From autonomous cars and digital doctors

One very interesting topic of our first lecture in Digital Marketing was disruptive innovations.  

Disruptive innovations are inventions that, as the name suggests, disrupt or even destroy something. They can change the market they enter dramatically, by being for example better or cheaper than existing products. 

Let’s have a look at some products that will have such a great impact on us and change our lives in the near future. 

One example of a disruptive innovation that we discussed in class were autonomous vehicles such as the google car that provides us with a vision of cars driving people from one place to another without any effort from their passengers. This car could be the trigger of a new business model, in which it will no longer be necessary to own a car. The only thing you will need is an App to order a car to the place you need it and let it drive you to where you want to go. Further, the driver saves valuable time by not having to concentrate on the road, which offers us various advantages.

Google car

Specialists assume that it will take no longer than one or two decades until we will be confronted with this technology in our day to day life. Until now, most of us have only seen the google car, which is the pioneer in this autonomous car industry, but not a very attractive looking model.
But we have many other well-known car manufacturers that are starting to create their own autonomous car. Audi, VW and Mercedes are just a few examples.  Considering the above mentioned advantages arising from not having to concentrate on the road. Mercedes has a car planned, with side panels that could display information, social media, or other applications on it.
If you can already picture yourself in such a futuristic car, what would you want to do with this additional time? 

Inside an autonomous mercedes

Autonomous mercedes

Another field that offers great potential for disruptive innovations is the health and fitness industry. There are already many Apps on the market that collect, report, and respond to information from the user’s own body and transfer them mostly to the user’s smartphone or tablet. The earliest type of applications could for example count our steps or recognize when we were asleep. Today’s technology makes it possible to go much further, by for example measuring our glucose level, emotional state, temperature, sleep patterns, pulse, alcohol level, weight, blood pressure, and much more.

There are even technologies that can help treat ADHD and autism by measuring attention and focus through eye tracking over the tablets’ camera or even stimulate the brain to block pain receptors for patients with chronic conditions. It is quite realistic that soon these technologies will lead to a revolution in the health care system, allowing patients to become active participants in diagnosis, treatment and preventive care. This kind of revolution could make it possible to live longer in our own houses without needing home care. Also we could push the need to move to a retirement home further away.  

Having just recently read the Interview with Mr Keen, these innovations once again leave us thinking. Are all these technological and digital innovations a blessing or a curse?