A New Stage of Progression for Technology?

With the new administration in Washington, it may be useful to look at what has engendered new stages of technological innovation and adoption. The US economy has always tended to thrive in periods associated with the rise of certain key technologies: the Railroad, the Automobile, the Telephone, the Computer, the Internet. Where are we now, and where do we go to identify and develop the next innovations and advances that will support growth from here forward?

In the case of the internal combustion engine and the automobile, the basic automobile appeared late in the 19th century, with the factory-produced version of what we would still recognize as an automobile – with pneumatic tires, transmission, and conventional steering - appearing in 1902. Vast improvements have been made since then, yet even after endless layers of enhancements, the basic architecture and technology of a modern-day Corvette, Lexus or Lincoln is based on the original design worked out by people like Ransom Olds, Karl Benz and Henry Ford in their day.
The same may be said for modern civilian aircraft. Jet engines, avionics and airframe design are the product of relentless improvement techniques over the last 60 years, but the basic nature of a passenger jet aircraft derives from 1954. One might well chart the path of the cell phone, the personal computer, and other technologies in the same manner.
Understanding these natural cycles of fundamental innovation, followed by decades of enhancement, improvement and fine-tuning, it may be that our development of business models, techniques and operating methods has followed a similar path. In each of these instances, then:
o Improvements are achieved from a wide variety of sources
o Once improvements are gained by one party, the others identify them and appropriate them rapidly
o Each round of improvements produces its own advances, yet the incremental advance gained from each successive round of improvements is significantly less than from the improvements in the early years. (In the 1920s, cars went to enclosed passenger compartments, electric starters and modern suspensions. By the 1990s, we went from rubber motor mounts to fluid motor mounts. Consider also the advance from MS-DOS in the mid-80s to Microsoft Windows, as opposed to the 2007 “advance” from Windows XP to Windows Vista.)
If we apply this concept to our business practices and methods, it may look something like this:

Innovation ==> Evolution ==> Improvement ==> Enhancement ==> Entropy ==> Innovation ==>

Looked at in this fashion, it may be that most of the basic features of industrial organization that we recognize today – the classic organization chart, the role of a Board of Directors, mass production, the assembly line, and the basics of wage and salary administration – showed up in the “evolution” phase.
Following the model, much of the internal arts showed up fairly late in the game, primarily in the “enhancement” phase. I would also suggest that in some ways, and in certain industries (airlines?) we may be already well into the “entropy” phase. Indeed, it is entirely possible that in sectors of our economy facing chronic entropy, it is entirely likely that several of the internal arts are being applied not in a fashion that truly results in enhancement, but merely to stave off or reduce the acceleration of entropy.
In this way, we may be at the close of an era that has seen the wide-ranging enhancement of our business techniques and operational methods, many of them internal, yet perhaps we are overdue for a re-evaluation of the type that would bring us to a new foundation, a new starting point in certain ways.
To examine this likelihood, we might very well examine the alternative, that being that we might be able to simply preserve our same basic business models and go on improving them as we have already been – perhaps for decades more. To evaluate this concept properly is truly the subject of a different book, and several already written attempts to get at some of these issues. For our purposes here, we’re best served to recognize that there are such things as moments of fundamental change. The migration from ancient monarchies to modern democracies, the American Revolution, the end of World War II, the rise of information technology, the creation of open markets for securities, the arrival of global telecommunications – these were all fundamental changes. In each instance, there is a residual faction that attempts to hang on and even preserve the fading structures. But at some stage, it becomes apparent and even obvious that a fundamental shift has taken place.