Leapfrogging the boiling frog

In the second half of the 20th century it was relatively easy to develop a view of the future.  Predictions could be made by examining recent history and then projecting forward a few more years.

However, in the late 1990s, this process started to fall apart.  Advances in technology started to introduce uncertainty as adoption rates began to surge and predictions could no longer rely on straight line extrapolations of the past.

A prime example of this is the failure of analysts to comprehend the uptake of smartphones. For successive years they looked at historical sales and then increased this trend by a few percent.  Each year, the uptake rate would surge, smashing their modest growth predictions. 

Companies that relied on this analysis became the metaphorical frog in the boiling water – failing to understand that it would soon be too late to change. In the case of smartphones, Nokia was one of the most affected high-profile organisations.

While senior business leaders may look at the example of Nokia with a sense of smugness, adopting this mindset does not equip them well to understand how this insight might affect their own businesses.

Significant acceleration
This is because the pace of technology change has accelerated significantly since the introduction of the smartphone and, increasingly, it provides the opportunity for forward thinking companies to leapfrog existing offerings.

For example, mobile phone usage in Africa and India has leapfrogged legacy telecommunications infrastructure. Today it would seem foolhardy to provision a landline connection to a remote African township but in the mid-1990s this decision would not have been so obvious.

In today’s world there are many industries where technology advances could provide other leapfrog opportunities.

Take cars, for example. It’s well understood driverless transportation will be available in the coming decades. There's a wide range of estimates about exactly when this will happen but undoubtedly it will. Alongside these predictions are estimates of how many cars will be required on the roads. However, these predictions are based on historical straight-line analysis of how we use cars today, and therein lies a problem.

We use cars because they offer access to opportunity but what if there was another way to access the same opportunities? 

Virtual reality
This question then widens the focus to consider other technologies, including the use of virtual reality (VR) as a way of accessing opportunity.  Advances in VR are moving much faster than advances in car technology and it’s highly likely that by the time driverless cars are ready for daily use, VR will have moved on to the point where the virtual world provides a viable alternative to access opportunity without the need to physically travel.

If this situation eventuates, then the need for cars – and indeed airlines – could decline significantly.

Leapfrogging is also likely to affect agriculture.

Many industry analysts look to precision agriculture as the way of the future and, indeed, using technology on farms has had significant benefits.

Manufacturers of agricultural machinery incorporate GPS systems for accuracy, satellite imagery enables farmers to check yield predictions and big data can predict the impact of weather conditions.

These advances enable farmers to increase their efficiency but farming is still anchored in a production model that really hasn’t changed since humans stopped roaming the plains in search of meat.

Vertical farming
Today a new model of production is emerging, which has the potential to significantly leapfrog agriculture – vertical farming.

As the name suggests, vertical farming doesn’t expand horizontally but consists of rows and rows of plants growing in racks indoors. The environmental conditions are carefully controlled, with exactly the right nutrients and lighting supplied to optimise growth. This level of environmental control means no herbicides or pesticides are required, effectively creating organic produce on an industrial scale.

Vertical farming is a new industry but farms in Japan are already producing 21,000 heads of lettuces a day from a two-storey 4000sqm building. The farms can be located within cities, usually in disused warehouses, thereby reducing transportation and distribution costs.

In Japan some vertical farms will soon leverage robotic technologies, which also increase the efficiency of the operation, removing the need for ‘expensive’ labour.

This combination of technologies makes it entirely feasible to create a ‘farm’ with efficiency levels that leave the traditional model in the proverbial dust.  What’s more, productivity is absolutely predictable – there are no issues with weather or disease.

DNA editing
Critics may counter that vertical farming is only suited to some crops but this is likely to change fast when plants become engineered through the use of extremely cheap DNA-editing tools such as CRISPR.

The possibility of CRISPR-edited plants grown in highly efficient vertical farms presents the agricultural industry with a step change in innovation. Consider, for example, the concept of vertical farms growing high-protein plants – such as yellow split peas – that have been engineered to thrive indoors. This would fuel the rapid growth of plant protein products that offer real substitutes to animal meat, such as that of Impossible Foods.

The very nature of leap frogging highlights just how challenging it can be to place bets – particularly those that rely on current or predicted technology development. This is clearly illustrated when examining past predictions of which technologies were expected to have the biggest impact. 

For example, over the past 20 years, the widely quoted Gartner Hype Cycle has only ever successfully identified four technologies that went from development to widespread impact.

So what should organisations do to mitigate their chances of becoming the frog in boiling water? Perhaps the best option is to focus on thematic trends and that’s the focus on my next column.