Technology is an enabler
Lots of people mistakenly believe it is technology which drives innovation. Yet from the definitions above, that is actually not the case. It's opportunity which defines innovation and technology which enables innovation. Consider the classic "Build a better mousetrap" example taught generally in most business schools. It's likely you have the technology to build a better mousetrap, but when you yourself have no mice or the old mousetrap is effective, there is no opportunity and then the technology to build a better one becomes irrelevant. On one other hand, if you are overrun with mice then the opportunity exists to innovate something making use of your technology.
Another example, one with which I'm intimately familiar, are gadgets startup companies. I've been related to both the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Each possessed unique leading edge technologies. The difference was opportunity. The ones that failed couldn't find the opportunity to produce a meaningful innovation utilizing their technology. In reality to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into something many different and if they were lucky they might make the most of derivatives of the original technology. http://yourtechcrunch.com/ More regularly than not, the first technology wound up in the scrap heap. Technology, thus, is an enabler whose ultimate value proposition is to produce improvements to the lives. In order to be relevant, it must be used to create innovations which are driven by opportunity.
Technology as a competitive advantage?
Many companies list a technology as one of the competitive advantages. Is this valid? Sometimes yes, but Typically no.
Technology develops along two paths - an evolutionary path and a revolutionary path.
A revolutionary technology is one which enables new industries or enables solutions to problems that were previously not possible. Semiconductor technology is a great example. Not only did it spawn new industries and products, nonetheless it spawned other revolutionary technologies - transistor technology, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology. All which provide many of the products and services we consume today. But is semiconductor technology a competitive advantage? Taking a look at how many semiconductor firms that exist today (with new ones forming every day), I'd say not. How about microprocessor technology? Again, no. Plenty of microprocessor companies out there. How about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as numerous companies, but you have Intel, AMD, ARM, and a bunch of companies building custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So again, little of a competitive advantage. Competition from competing technologies and quick access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive advantageous asset of any particular technology. Android vs iOS is a great exemplory instance of how this works. Both operating systems are derivatives of UNIX. Apple used their technology to introduce iOS and gained an early on market advantage. However, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), caught up relatively quickly. The reason why because of this lie not in the underlying technology, however in how the products made possible by those technologies were brought to market (free vs. walled garden, etc.) and the differences in the strategic visions of each company.https://arstechnician.com/
Evolutionary technology is one which incrementally builds upon the base revolutionary technology. But by it's very nature, the incremental change is simpler for a competitor to match or leapfrog. Take for instance wireless cellphone technology. Company V introduced 4G products just before Company A and while it could have experienced a short term advantage, the moment Company A introduced their 4G products, the benefit due to technology disappeared. The buyer went back to choosing Company A or Company V centered on price, service, coverage, whatever, but not centered on technology. Thus technology could have been relevant in the temporary, however in the future, became irrelevant.https://techwaa.com/
In today's world, technologies often ver quickly become commoditized, and within any particular technology lies the seeds of a unique death.
Technology's Relevance
This article was written from the prospective of an end customer. From the developer/designer standpoint things get murkier. The further one is removed from the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a developer, the technology will look just like a product. An enabling product, but something nonetheless, and thus it is highly relevant. Bose works on the proprietary signal processing technology allow products that meet a couple of market requirements and thus the technology and what it enables is strongly related them. https://techsitting.com/ Their customers are more focused on how it sounds, what's the cost, what's the product quality, etc., and not so much with how it is achieved, thus the technology used is significantly less strongly related them.
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