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What Will Be the Most Powerful
Industry or
Technology that Will Drive the Economy?
By Jack Speer, BizWatch Co-publisher
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Putting Your Money on the "Next Big Thing"?
What's the next big thing that will
revolutionize our lives and fuel our economy?--everyone
is looking for it. We often swear we knew all
along that the "next big thing" would be "X," but
unfortunately we weren't strong enough in our opinions
to actually buy the stock. That's the way I felt
about Google; too bad I didn't buy it.
Mom Said Television Would Be No
Big Deal--Her Banker Told Her So
Guessing what's going to be big is
tough. When I was a kid growing up in Tomball, Texas
before the town was gobbled up by Houston, the biggest
"next thing" was television. TV was done live in those
days, and when I began lobbying my Mom |
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Bio-Nano
Technology--the
Next Big Thing on the Horizon? |
| and Dad for a TV set,
my mom assured me that a banker had
told her the only thing they'd ever have on
television were puppet shows, one of the
mainstays of early TV.
Yet in a few years, everyone had a
set and early TV spawned a legion
of
television repairmen who would come out and fix your TV, usually
replacing one of the huge vacuum tubes. The TV was one of the
great engines that fired the economy. TV is one of those
historical examples of of an invention that took the world by storm.
Spotting "the Next Big Thing" |
To identify the next big you have to be able to know
things like:
- Will everyone need to get one?
- Will they cause everyone to replace the one they have?
- Will they cause employees to be more
productive?
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| Although this one is
a mixed blessing because every time productivity
increases--say in the case of those irritating voice
mail messages where you "press one" if you speak
Hungarian or "press 12" if your product is making
strange noises--a lot of people lose their jobs.
We hear our clients complain and grumble because there are no new Internet equivalents or innovations as big as email. Those two
inventions fueled a lot of the economy of the nineties, spawning new
ventures and driving productivity. What I think is amazing
from my point of view is that I had read a little bit about the
Internet but didn't know anything about it, and my awareness of email came out of the blue.
Then
suddenly everyone from the corporate executive to high school
students and grandmothers needed a computer and all the software.
Did the earlier developers dream of how big these technologies would
be? Might there not be some technology that could burst on
the scene today?
Will Biotech Grow Us New Body Parts, Make Us
Live Forever and Fuel Our Economy?
Many of us have grown up on the idea that high
tech is always
the driver of the economy, as it was during the 90s. Yet the
field of biotechnology is an emerging factor that will change the
world, but exactly when its time has come is more difficult to
predict
than reading bird entrails to know the future. The
reason is that it has more to do with medicine than technology and,
since it is organic in nature, we are less able to predict the time
lines or
anticipate the side-effect issues.
Stem cell research may come closest to
the sayings of the Bible about making the blind to walk and
the lame to see. Yet it is barely in is infancy. Again,
timing is everything, isn't it? A great number of products
today are not "big" innovations, although they |
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are enormously successful. They are products
that are just gradually morphing into multiple functions,
as in the case of cell phones with cameras. And
the risk is high. I
heard an executive say recently that in this kind of
technology you have to launch 10 products to get one
that is successful.
Industry Consolidation and Efficiencies Creation
A functional "new thing" is industries that
are consolidating. Huge MIS systems allow
financial institutions to operate customer service,
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| banking, funds transfers, and a
myriad of other functions that at on time would
have required hundreds of retail locations throughout the world.
Warren Buffet is famous for buying an underperforming corporation
and merging it with diverse businesses to lower costs. Will the economy continue to build on smaller product innovations
or is there something really big out there ready to be unveiled? Actually the Nineties brought us
some major innovations--and a lot of crazy notions that went bust
turn of the new century.
Which will it be, the "next big thing" or a lot of little things?
Actually, steady, incremental progress isn't all that bad.
Yet who wouldn't want to be a part of "the next Internet.?
Progress over the next five to ten
years will probably be both incremental and dramatic.
Right now industries seem to be moving forward
step-by-step, creating a better way to download music, a
more creative game, or a better cell phone or
blackberry. And the economy can go solidly forward
with these gradual, incremental improvements in
products.
Waiting in the Wings--Huge Breakthroughs
But waiting in the wings are
hugely dramatic breakthroughs that have the potential to
once again completely revolutionize the world.
Molecular Nano Technology to usher in an
era when "going under the knife" in conventional surgery
would be obsolete, because medical devices at the
molecular level could operate internally within the
patient. The world energy crisis is
approaching apocalyptic proportions, and that actually
might be a good thing. France just got the
contract to develop Nuclear Fission, the process
the Sun uses to manufacture energy. The energy
supply would be clean and unlimited. Every
automobile in the world would be replaced, along with
most energy systems. Stem cells may
generate replacement body parts.
The key to these developments is visionary, intelligent
people who will lead us into the future,
the special leader of the 90s--the Bill Gates, the
Michael Dells, and their sort. We may not always
like them or even want to be like them. Yet
visionary people are always the key to any economic
progress. The way forward not only depends
on the technology. It depends on the people with
the determination to fulfill the vision.
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