Technology Acquisition in an “Innovation Crisis”
I chose this article because we are currently studying the adoption of new technology within networks. I have always found Apple’s scheduled release of innovated devices interesting strategically, and our discussions in class have brought me to question certain aspects of it.
This article suggests that Apple might be reaching an “innovation crisis”—one in which it has run out of ways to innovate the iPhone, causing a loss of interest in customers to update to newer versions. I find this quite interesting; in class, when we talked about technology acquisition, we were concerned with clustering, and how that might inhibit spread. It seems that iPhone use is quite widespread rather than clustered—partly because adoption of iPhone technology brings such significant direct benefit (the ability to use iMessage, for example). Thus, a lack of adoption of new iPhone technology points to a higher threshold value in the network; the new technology simply isn’t that much more desirable than the old technology. It seems as though an “innovation crisis” like this one can be defined concretely by how well new technology from a company is able to pervade networks of existing technology from that same company. It is interesting that the competing technologies in a network are sometimes that of the same company.
I also found the seeming expectation for companies like Apple to output highly innovative technology on a rapid, constant schedule quite interesting; this is likely because other companies are outputting new technology equally as rapidly, and this new technology threatens the relevancy of Apple’s technology. As an area of further research, it might be interesting to investigate how one might model, using networks, multiple (more than two) competing technologies that are introduced at different times. Technology acquisition in real life is often much more complex than some models can account for. In this sense, it is important to innovate our models alongside technological innovations.