New disruptive inventions don’t only affect manufacturers like our button manufacturer in yesterday’s post. Sometimes technology affects service businesses as well. Let’s consider the safety razor and the impact it had on the barber industry. While Jean-Jacques Perret invented the safety razor in France during the latter part of the 18th century, the invention reached its tipping point over a hundred years later in the early 20th century. King Camp Gillette sold 51 razors in 1903, and over 90 thousand razors the next year. Soon he was selling 450 thousand razors and over 70 million blades a year. The safety razor had reached its tipping point. No longer did the average man have to visit the barber every day or two to get his beard shaved.
When the safety razor reached its tipping point the barber business evaporated almost overnight. What technological products nearing their tipping point might affect your business or economic model? Sometimes the disruptive invention is obvious as is the case with the zipper and the safety razor since they solve problems in that industry, but other times an invention in another industry may affect your industry.
If you were a watch manufacturer would you have thought that the cell phone would decimate your industry? How about if you were a travel agent? Would you have foreseen how the PC and access to the Internet would place your industry on a path to extinction? What are you reading, listening to, or watching that will provide you the insight into impending disruptive technologies ready to reach the tipping point? Is your industry about to be rendered obsolete by an emerging technology? What can you do now to position your business in such a way as to take advantages of genetic engineering, micromechanical devices, or the likes of the tablet computer? Do you need to redefine your industry? Are you taking a few minutes out of each day to look up from the trenches and consider how what you see and hear about the future may affect your business?
