Technology: Innovation, Convergence and Disruption

Patrick McConnell

This chapter will describe some of the key concepts and definitions from the strategy and technology literatures, focusing on the areas of technology innovation, convergence and disruption. The chapter will also look at trends in technology, particularly IT, and follow the high-level rationale (as shown in Figure 1.1) that the exponential growth in capacity in a number of core hardware technologies, in addition to the virtualisation of technology, where the physical location of technology (especially computers and data) has become unimportant, which has resulted in the democratisation of technology, putting power (literally) in the hands of consumers.

It is the right-hand side of this equation in Figure 1.1, ie, democratisation of technology, that has – and will continue to have – enormous impact on financial institutions and their corporate strategies. It should be noted that “democratisation” is not used here in the political sense, although technology is having an impact on politics, merely that choice, as regards which technologies to use and how to use them, is increasingly being placed in the hands of individuals rather than corporations and