Creating The Next "Killer App"

(Via Sloan Review). Companies in general have trouble shifting technological paradigms, and the gestation period for the use of technologies in business often a matter of decades - The Harvard Business School Internet2Business Applications (or "Biz-Apps") Group, found that the impediments to correctly identifying future billion-dollar market segments in communication technologies are formidable. For one thing, in both the commercial and academic realms, there is a tendency to adopt existing industries as frames of reference for new technologies rather than envisioning new industries or new forms for existing industries. Similarly, there is a tendency to anchor thinking in existing customer segments or to use others' ideas to extend one's own favorite thesis rather than to engage in true recombination of ideas. There is also a tendency to think in terms of a single "killer app" even though the next big thing is likely to be a combination of applications. Two practices are vital to overcoming these and other limiting tendencies in the pursuit of new technology-enabled businesses.
Simply try things out: The next killer app will emerge through a process of "recursive visioning and innovative doing." Today's information technologies have radically reduced the fixed and design cost of simply trying things. Work processes have become iterative as engineers engage in real-time experiments.
Focus on the information context : If killer apps will indeed emerge in nonobvious ways, the process can only be enhanced if applications are deployed in a context that provides more information than is actually needed for the application. This will create opportunities to discover more important uses for the app than were originally intended. Extrapolation of the present will follow lines less straight and more recombinant than can be deciphered. In that case, we will need processes and technologies that will allow us to intelligently stumble upon the future.