How Executives Can Avoid Being Disrupted by Emerging Technologies

Executives must anticipate rapid technology shifts, which increasingly disrupt businesses, and find new markets and partnering opportunities. Accenture’s global disruption index, which quantifies economic, social, geopolitical, climate, consumer and technology changes, indicates disruption occurs at a rate 50 times greater than just five years ago. How can executives stay ahead of the curve?

Anticipating Technology Trends Is Important

By anticipating disruptive technologies and positioning their companies to use them, forward-thinking executives can safeguard operations against obsolescence and uncover new avenues for growth, efficiency, and innovation. Organizations can identify and adopt technology early to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, personalize customer experiences, and unlock data-driven insights that inform strategic decision-making.

Amazon was an early mover in e-commerce, investing heavily in online infrastructure and logistics to become an industry leader. Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and revolutionized the mobile phone industry with touchscreen technology, mobile apps, and a refined user experience. Netflix disrupted traditional cable TV and DVD rental models by introducing video on demand, while Uber upended the taxi and limousine industry with app-based ride-sharing. These companies identified and harnessed emerging technologies to create new business opportunities, gain market share, boost revenues, and solidify their reputations as innovative leaders.

Can You Be a “Technology Fortune Teller?”

New technology is notoriously unpredictable because of factors ranging from cost and usability to perceived value and emerging standards. Unforeseen disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic can render carefully crafted predictions obsolete overnight.

Early adopters can also struggle with overemphasizing readily available information or refusing to abandon investments that are no longer viable. Technology success hinges on supporting infrastructure and complementary products, which create a web of interdependencies that is difficult to predict. Executives must stay informed of emerging technologies to proactively adopt the ones that will matter most.

How to Identify Technology Trends

You can’t be an infallible “technology fortune teller,” but you can cultivate an organizational ecosystem primed for learning, adaptability, and innovation. This requires a multifaceted strategy that embeds technological awareness, engagement, and agility into the company’s fabric. We recommend executives develop four capabilities to spot technology trends:

1. Engage in Technology Monitoring and Scouting

This goes beyond casual observation of industry trends; it demands a structured, systematic approach to surveying the technological landscape. You can create a dedicated technology scouting team that identifies promising innovations, assesses their potential impact on the business, and rapidly experiments with them. It should have a charter and mechanism to quickly downselect the trends that matter most to your company. The team should partner with research institutions and cutting-edge startups, providing a direct pipeline to emerging technologies that can help solve current and future business problems. Stay informed: read industry reports and analyst insights, attend technology conferences, and network with partners to understand how technology is evolving in your industry.

Tip: Hold briefings on emerging technologies and their impact on your company’s business. Ask for volunteers to solve business problems using these technologies. This will build a guiding coalition and develop necessary technology skills in your business units.

Tip: The technology scouting team must focus on delivering tangible business value, not exploring new technologies for novelty’s sake. Establish key performance indicators that hold the team accountable for impact on products, operations, or customer experience.

Tip: If establishing a dedicated technology scouting team is not feasible, a savvy alternative is to create a virtual scouting team comprised of leaders across your organization. By tapping into the diverse perspectives and domain expertise of stakeholders from different business units, you can better understand emerging technologies and their potential impact.

2. Create a Culture of Curiosity and Experimentation

This cultural shift involves more than encouraging employees to stay informed. Create an environment where innovative thinking is rewarded and risk-taking is encouraged. The goal is for your organization to tap into its workforce’s collective intelligence and creativity.

Tip: Create a CoE. No, not a center of excellence—a center of engagement. In this CoE, everyone—technologists and business users—is encouraged to try new technologies and report their results. Make the CoE scrappy and fast; encourage rapid on-the-job training and share successes and failures. By promoting experimentation and collaboration, you will determine which emerging technologies you should adopt faster across the entire organization.

Tip: Hold internal hackathons and invite the technology provider to participate; this helps your staff trust the technology and company-wide experimentation. You can also evaluate the technologies’ Technology Readiness Level, a measurement system developed by NASA.

3. Use Technology Road Mapping and Scenario Planning

For sophisticated technology road mapping and scenario planning, you need to envision and prepare for multiple outcomes. Assemble small, diverse cross-functional teams, combining technological expertise with business acumen. These teams should use modeling techniques and data analytics to create dynamic, adaptable roadmaps. Review and update these roadmaps regularly to ensure they remain relevant in the face of rapid technological change.

For each technology, consider:

• Will your employees adopt it?
• Will it solve a business problem?
• Can you explain it to business users?
• Can you afford it?

Tip: Create a one-page position paper on each interesting emerging technology:

1. List your current action on the technology (i.e., are you watching, evaluating, testing, actively experimenting, operating, or retiring the technology?).
2. Add a paragraph about why this technology is relevant to your business.
3. Add a section about each technology, which business units could benefit, and the people and partners involved.
4. Update your position every six months.

Consider sharing this brief position paper with suppliers, partners, and customers with whom you want to collaborate. It will impress the employees who ask, “What do you know about technology x?”

4. Form External Partnerships

No organization, no matter how large or well-resourced, can hope to stay abreast of all technological developments. Engaging with a diverse network of partners (from established technology vendors to nimble startups and from academic institutions to industry peers) can provide insights and access to cutting-edge innovations. These partnerships can take various forms, from formal research collaborations to participation in industry consortia or investment in venture capital funds focused on emerging technologies.

Tip: Talk with your providers about their roadmaps and offer to test their emerging technologies. If you can use them to solve a real business problem, you will raise their priority for partners and speed up adoption. The best part? You won’t have to maintain them—the technology partner does that.

Tip: Establish a formal process for evaluating and integrating external innovations. This might involve creating a dedicated team to assess potential technological partnerships or acquisitions. Companies that do this reap the benefits of combining external innovations and internal capabilities.

Get Going. Now Would Be Good. Yesterday Would Have Been Better.

The digital revolution demands that leaders stay abreast of technological change. You can leverage technology monitoring, experimentation, road mapping, and external partnerships to stay ahead of disruptive trends in AI, IoT, cloud, cybersecurity, sustainability, and more.