Of all the technologies already existing in our world, which have the capability to disrupt whole industries in the next 3-5 years? Or perhaps that's the wrong question. Instead of focusing on technology as the sole source of disruption, maybe I should ask, which of our existing technologies are capable of enabling the disruption of an industry in the next 3-5 years? This, to me, is an important differentiation because disruption doesn't necessarily follow from using the newest technology, but rather from how technology supports your goal of creating products for your customers that are desirable and viable. In other words, if you look back at the innovation's sweet spot, technology is just one of the building blocks. This week, I want to talk about how technology is enabling businesses to better understand their customers and provide solutions to important problems that their customers are facing. The technologies will cover our artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, or AR, and Virtual Reality, VR, as well as Blockchain. We talk about these in particular, because artificial intelligence has the potential to change the tasks that are currently being done by humans through automation, and at the same time help you uncover valuable insights from your customers. The Internet of Things has a potential to increase device connectivity, enabling more immediate information sharing and coordination, and to lock customers in to particular platforms of interconnected devices and services. AR has the potential to impact industries and businesses where visual enhancement of human capabilities offer advantages either in the customer experience or in worker productivity. VR has a potential to enhance entertainment, training and education, and for the degree learner, we look at how Blockchain has a potential to impact businesses and industries in which enhance data transparency and security are of more importance to their business model. In general, I'm presenting these technologies because I want to expose you to their potential. I feel that these particular technologies are highly applicable to a large number of industries and organizations. If you are like me, and drawn to technology, this might be the week where you jump into solution mode. By this, I'll talk about a technology and you might say, this is a technology that I need for my organization and abandon the course. Some of you will be asking if there's a framework that will help you decide if you should use this technology or that technology. My recommendation for those of you who find the technology you want to implement and those who are looking for a framework is to stick around until Week 6, where we will provide you with a comprehensive framework to help you think about disruptive innovation in a holistic way. This framework considers not only the technology, but also desirability and viability to help you bring together what we cover each week. Lastly, two caveats about the material in these videos. Number one is that the technologies and examples I present are current as at the time of filming. However, they will date quickly, regardless, these technologies will be the building blocks for the next generation of technologies, so I hope that you will see value in covering them. The second caveat is that, we won't comprehensively cover these technologies and indeed, there might be students taking this course who know more than me about these technologies. This course aims to give you a high-level overview only, and then concentrates on how to be disruptive. Let's get started.
