Disruptive Technology

Disruptive Technologies outlines the steps businesses can take to engage with emerging technologies today in order to serve the consumer of tomorrow. This book offers the knowledge and tools to engage confidently with emerging technologies for better business. This highly practical book offers organizations a distinct response to emerging technologies including Blockchain (Bitcoin), artificial intelligence, graphene and nanotechnology (among others) and other external factors (such as the sharing economy, mobile penetration, millennial workforce, ageing populations) that impact on their business, client service and product model. Disruptive Technologies provides a clear roadmap to assess, respond to and problem-solve: what are the upcoming changes in technology, roughly when to respond, and what's the best response? By using a quick-to-master evaluation and decision-making framework - structured around the key dimensions of Technology, Behaviour and Data (TBD). Emerging technologies guru Paul Armstrong offers a clear guide to the key disruptive technologies and a toolbox of frameworks, checklists, and activities to evaluate their possibilities. Disruptive Technologies enables forecasting of potential scenarios, implementation of plans, alternative strategies and the ability to handle change more effectively within an organization. The essential tool for all professionals who need to get to grips with emerging technologies fast and strategically.

The proliferation of entrepreneurship, technological and business innovations, emerging social trends and lifestyles, employment patterns, and other developments in the global context involve creative destruction that transcends geographic and political boundaries and economic sectors and industries. This creates a need for an interdisciplinary exploration of disruptive technologies, their impacts, and their implications for various stakeholders widely ranging from government agencies to major corporations to consumer groups and individuals. Disruptive Technology: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines innovation, imitation, and creative destruction as critical factors and agents of socio-economic growth and progress in the context of emerging challenges and opportunities for business development and strategic advantage. Highlighting a range of topics such as IT innovation, business strategy, and sustainability, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business executives, business professionals, academicians, and researchers interested in strategic decision making using innovations and competitiveness.

This book is about how technologies are used in practice to support learning and teaching in higher education. Despite digitization and e-learning becoming ever-increasingly popular in university teaching settings, this book convincingly argues instead in favour of simple and convenient technologies, thus disrupting traditional patterns of learning, teaching and assessment. Michael Flavin uses Disruptive Innovation theory, Activity Theory and the Community of Practice theory as lenses through which to examine technology enhanced learning. This book will be of great interest to all academics with teaching responsibilities, as it illuminates how technologies are used in practice, and is also highly relevant to postgraduate students and researchers in education and technology enhanced learning. It will be especially valuable to leaders and policy-makers in higher education, as it provides insights to inform decision-making on technology enhanced learning at both an institutional and sectoral level.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest technological evolution which is transforming the global economy and is a major part of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” This book covers the meaning, types, subfields and applications of AI, including U.S. governmental policies and regulations, ethical and privacy issues, particularly as they pertain and affect facial recognition programs and the Internet-of Things (IoT). There is a lengthy analysis of bias, AI’s effect on the current and future job market, and how AI precipitated fake news. In addition, the text covers basics of intellectual property rights and how AI will transform their protection. The author then moves on to explore international initiatives from the European Union, China’s New Generation Development Plan, other regional areas, and international conventions. The book concludes with a discussion of super intelligence and the question and applicability of consciousness in machines. The interdisciplinary scope of the text will appeal to any scholars, students and general readers interested in the effects of AI on our society, particularly in the fields of STS, economics, law and politics.

This book explores and analyzes emerging innovations within today’s most cutting-edge science and technology (S&T) areas, which are cited as carrying the potential to revolutionize governmental structures, economies, and international security. Some have argued that such technologies will yield doomsday scenarios and that military applications of such technologies have even greater potential than nuclear weapons to radically change the balance of power. As the United States looks to the future – whether dominated by extremist groups co-opting advanced weapons in the world of globalized non-state actors or states engaged in persistent regional conflicts in areas of strategic interest – new adversaries and new science and technology will emerge. Choices made today that affect science and technology will impact how ably the US can and will respond. Chapters within the book look at the changing strategic environment in which security operations are planned and conducted; how these impact science and technology policy choices made today; and predictions of how science and technology may play a beneficial or deleterious role in the future. Some game changing technologies have received global attention, while others may be less well known; the new technologies discussed within this proposal, as well as future discoveries, may significantly alter military capabilities and may generate new threats against military and civilian sectors.

Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology: Harnessing the Power of Breakthrough Technology for Competitive Advantage shows you how to profit from the next technological revolution. Nicholas D. Evans explains how to discover powerfully disruptive technologies more quickly, evaluate them more accurately, and implement them more profitably. He presents business-focused introductions to rapidly maturing technologies such as Web services, real-time computing, and P2P, then previews crucial trends like "software as a service," as well as next-generation technologies such as grid computing, electronic tagging, and location-based services.

The next two decades will see more waves of technological disruption than the previous fifty. Adaptability and understanding of technological changes are now mission-critical to every business. Disruptive Technologies offers a three-step framework that enables readers to choose how their business responds to technological upheaval rather than being led by changes forced upon them. Showing how to understand a new technology, evaluate the challenge it poses, and finally respond to it, readers will come away secure in the knowledge that they have a workable system with which they can navigate ongoing technological disruption. This second edition features new chapters on the Metaverse and Web 3.0, as well as case studies and discussions of emerging technologies such as NFTs, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, graphene and 3D/4D printing. If companies do not grasp how developing technologies will impact their operations, supply chains, people and products, they have little hope of weathering the ongoing storm of digital disruption. Disruptive Technologies is your essential guide to creating a stable response to constant technological upheaval.

This book examines how disruptive technologies and innovation underpin the attainment of a broader development agenda in Africa. Contributors show how distinctive forms of technological innovation can impact critical development processes. For example, disruptive technologies can deepen the ongoing democratic and governance waves in Africa, specifically in the area of contested elections. Similarly, innovations in agriculture, the environment and energy promote changes in value chain agriculture, and the use of sensors to manage e-waste and sustainable energy conservation are also transforming established practices. Furthermore, the role of disruptive technologies and innovation in education, health, financial services and the nature of paid work cannot be ignored. Individually and collectively, the authors discuss and highlight the mechanisms and initiatives that can contribute to the realization of the development goals of African countries, especially in a period where disruptive technologies are rapidly changing how things are done. As a result, this book, which represents one of the most recent systematic efforts to bring together dialogue on disruptive technologies in Africa, will be of particular use and benefit to a wide and an eclectic audience.