We have, for some time, been talking about the budget telecom network business model being a disruptive innovation. Looks like the word disruptive is very popular. Here is Ratan Tata describing mobile technology per se being disruptive, and modeling the Nano on that.
About 100 delegates — from academia, industry and the financial and entrepreneurial worlds — participated in the event, which concluded Wednesday evening with a lively roundtable discussion that included Mr. Gore and Mr. Hart, as well as Ratan N. Tata, the chairman of the Indian carmaker Tata Group and the manufacturer of the new, low-priced Nano automobile, and H. Fisk Johnson, the chairman and chief executive of the household product giant, S.C. Johnson & Son.
Mr. Johnson, whose company was praised by Mr. Gore as “one of the most sustainable in the world,” chatted about S.C. Johnson’s development of natural insecticides in Rwanda and the company’s use of biofuels to power factories in Vietnam and Indonesia.
“Disruptive,” Mr. Hart said, invoking the buzzword of the evening.
Mr. Tata pointed to the mobile phone’s ubiquity in the developing world as an example of a disruptive, leapfrog technology (albeit not exactly a green one) that has proliferated in poorer nations, providing communications to millions of people in places where landline infrastructure remains sparse or nonexistent.
“When I was a kid, you waited seven years for a telephone connection,” he said.
1 Comment
Sabine Schreiber
This is such a great post on this subject. I do agree totally. Please keep posting.