Cocktail Investing

Chapter 6Enabling and Disruptive Technologies

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

– Charles Darwin

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

– Peter Drucker

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

– Theodore Levitt

In this chapter, we will be looking at the enabling and disruptive effects technology can have on industries, companies, and consumers and how that creates investment opportunities. Some companies have risen to the challenges and adapted their business models around those enabling technologies, while others struggled with and in some cases denied the very changes that were happening around them.

Disruptive and enabling technologies aren't something that you can easily define in a noncontextual way, but the impacts of them are often the very things you might muse over when sharing a cocktail with friends. We will walk through some examples to show you what was changing and who benefited from it by providing enabling technologies so that you can practice seeing the world this way yourselves. It's all about detecting the shift in the way people do things, keeping your eyes open for the beginning of that change and patiently watching to see which companies take advantage of it best.

From an investor's perspective, disruptive and enabling technologies dramatically shift the playing field, altering the competitive ...