The 21st century is worthily pronounced the era of technologies that keep on reshaping our reality and changing our lives every day. Such terms as disruptive and emergent technologies are widely known nowadays. And even though they are often wrongly equaled, both terms illustrate different qualities of the technologies and denote the different objects. This essay therefore aims to define and analyze both notions, providing the reasons and ways of their distinction.
In order to draw the distinction line between the two notions, they foremost need to be defined. Thereby, according to Business Dictionary definition, disruptive technologies are “new ways of doing things that disrupt or overturn the traditional business methods and practices”, while emergent technologies are “new technologies that are currently developing or will be developed over the next five to ten years, and which will substantially alter the business and social environment” (Business Dictionary). It may take some time for the emergent technology to become truly disruptive, the one which has its undermining value on the society.
Judging from the definitions, it may be stated that the core of the notion of emergent technology is its recent appearance or the early stage of its development with a high future potential. Disruptive technologies, even though they can be recent as well, denote the impact and novelty of the technologies themselves. Thereby the technology may be considered disruptive if it expresses and personifies a fresh idea of principle, bringing something to the world which was never seen or done before. For example, internet used to be a greatly disruptive technology at its very first appearance because it literally disrupted the way people communicated before.
As it was mentioned above, one of the inherent features of disruptive technologies is that they bring great changes forth and make a significant impact on the way of thinking and doing things. It is the disruptive technology that challenges the world with some new approaches and ideas, the one that eventually makes the progress move forward.
Works Cited
AT&T Official Website. About Us: AT&T Company Profile. Web. n.d. Accessed 15 January
2017.
