Disruptive Space Technologies and Innovations: The Next Chapter

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Scott MadryDisruptive Space Technologies and InnovationsSpace and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22188-1_1

1. Fasten Your Seat Belt, It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride!

Scott Madry¹ 

(1)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

–Arthur C. Clarke

Why Write a Book on Disruptive Technologies and Space?

This is a book about disruptive innovations and space, and the current revolution in space activities around the world that is reshaping our space endeavors. There have been many books about space that tell how we get there, what we can do there, and what this all means for the people here on Earth. There have also been many business books about innovation and disruptive technologies. This work is focused on how disruptive innovation has developed and evolved over time, and how it has, at last, come to the domain of space, how it has transformed how we ‘do’ space, what that means, and where this is all going in the future.

This chapter will introduce the concept of disruptive technologies from the now rather well established traditional academic, business, and economics perspectives on the subject. It will include the history and theory of disruptive technologies and will provide definitions and basic concepts. We will cover the disruptive innovation model, again as it is generally understood from the traditional business perspective. This chapter sets the stage for the later presentation of space disruptive technologies, and how they are both similar and very different.

What Exactly Are Disruptive Space Innovations and Technologies?

Ultimately, we need to try to see how this process works, and also how it all fits together – in space, on the ground, in our lives, and in our future. Ultimately, we hope you, the reader, will consider what all of this has to do with you and your life, and the future of our planet.

Humans as Innovators

We are living in an era of unprecedented technological and social change. For over 99.9% of the time that we, Homo sapiens, have existed on this planet, and that is at least 200,000 years, or over 6,600 generations, we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, in roving bands of 10 to 50 people or so [1]. We lived in an intimate relationship with the local environment, and lived for generation after generation with basically the same technologies: stone tools and spears, woven baskets and animal skin pouches, clay pots, and simple implements of hunting and daily living. Nothing more than you could carry. We lived the life that our parents and their parents lived, and we passed on our material possessions and skills, our cultural toolkit, to our children, and they on to theirs.

However, eventually humans began to change into ‘Man, the Wise’ as we call ourselves (Homo sapiens), in ever-faster waves. First, there was the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture, and the mastery of tools and metals such as bronze and then iron, which led to permanent towns and then cities, the creation of food surpluses, wealth and, stratified societies with nobles and elites, and we became a species with a very different way of living in our world [2].

We lived in ever more complex and larger societies, with more specialization and ever-newer ways of making a living. Innovations and inventions were continually introduced and shared, and we became more and more settled in how we lived. Up until the late 1700’s or even later around the world, people pretty much lived their lives in a single and relatively constant cocoon of society, of social organization, and of understanding the relationship between human society and the world we live in. But this all began to change, and the world started to spin ever faster, if you will, and technological change became an ever-increasing and disorienting whirl.

The industrial age of steel and steam brought us enormous changes and innovations: steamships, locomotives, and rail networks, great bridges and industrial production and trade on a vast, global scale. We had new capabilities and new tools, and these brought us new ways to make our lives better, longer, and more fulfilled. But we also started to lose the connections that linked us to our history and our place in the world. We no longer could rely upon the technology and tools of our parents, and we could no longer be certain that what we knew would be enough to sustain our children. The future became more uncertain and less known.

And then came the silicon age, the age of the computer, of invisible zeros and ones, of email and the Internet, of digital data, and the spinning became a whirlwind. Wave after wave of new technologies, new computing capabilities, and new digital realities were washing over our lives. New businesses were rapidly replacing old ones and themselves being abandoned in flash.

Today, a person in the developed world may no longer rely upon the training and education they received in college to last them more than a few years before they require a ‘reboot’ in order to maintain enough knowledge to be productive in the ever-changing workspace. Wave after wave of new digital technologies are crashing upon us, and the question quickly becomes Will we surf the next tech wave, or will we be swamped? Parents live in a completely different digital world than their children, and the grandparents are left back in a previous version of the world that is deeply separated from that of their grandchildren. Grandpa does not do WhatsApp. The cloud, social computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, machine learning, big data, edge computing, constant observation of our planet and of our lives… all of these and more are washing over our social, political, and economic realities. It is all very unsettling, and we seem somehow less connected, even though we are constantly online with 24-hour cable news and social media.

And we are poorly equipped, by our evolution and our culture, to respond and react, let alone create a purposeful version of this that is actually beneficial and desirable for us. Humans have evolved to survive in the world in a way that is unique among the animals. Others come into the world already equipped to survive. Beavers know how to build lodges and robins know how to build their nests, but we survive through a complex web of ties that we call culture. Each of us is born into a culture, invisible yet enveloping, that we absorb from our parents and families, and that equips us with the language and social tools to be able to survive in almost any climate, from the high Arctic to the remotest of the Pacific islands. Our ability to learn, to adapt and adopt this web of culture has served us well, and yet we find ourselves in a new situation where the tools of our parents are irrelevant when we become adults. How do we give our children the tools they need to survive when we do not yet know what they are?

Several important questions are raised by all of this. They include: Has the world of technology accelerated to the point where it is now becoming counterproductive to humanity? When does the disruptive outweigh the innovation? How can societies plan for and make effective use of such rapid change? What do we do when we can no longer control or adapt to the ever-faster rate of technological change? There are many more questions and, interestingly enough, there is a tremendous amount of thought and development in creating these new technologies, but there are very few considerations of how these are impacting our world and what we can, or should, do about it. If we can develop it, we do it! However this all unfolds, there is no question that these things are going to have powerful impacts on all of our lives, and the lives of our children.

Space, and our access to space and the benefits that this provides to us, has become an integral part of our lives, as we shall explore later. Some aspects of this we can clearly see, but more often than not, space is integrated into our world in ways that we are not really aware of, such as the effect that the Global Positioning System (GPS ) has had on so many aspects of our lives. And space is undergoing its own radical change before our eyes. The entire space domain is undergoing a pervasive and rapid disruptive transformation, and that is what this book is about. What the financial, social, and personal effects of this will be remains uncertain, but we can begin to consider all this.

But what exactly is disruptive innovation ? It is a term we hear a great deal today, but what does it mean? Who first considered it? How does it actually work?

The Traditional Study of Disruptive Innovation

The initial concept of disruptive technologies, or disruptive innovation, was originally presented by Prof. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, published by the Harvard Business Review Press in 1997 [3]. In this seminal and game-changing book, he presents the case that the introduction of new technologies can disrupt, and even destroy, major existing businesses, even if they are doing everything correct from a standard business planning and management perspective. This book, and several others by him (i. e., The Innovator’s Solution [4]) and by other authors who have followed him, have very much altered how businesses, academics, and the tech sector think about, and try to plan for, cycles of disruption that are introduced by new technologies and new and innovative products and services. This is also very much the story of the disrupters themselves, the people who drive this process by their ideas and will.

There is now a rather well developed theory of disruptive innovation and technologies in the business school and economics literature, although there is also much discussion and argument among academics and others about what all this actually means, and how well the concept actually fits within different business sectors and cultures. This is normal, as that is what academics do, argue and debate new ideas and what they mean, while seeking to expand and develop the concepts. These discussions take on a life of their own, and grow and meander. Additional books, journal articles, and conferences continue to debate and expand these new ideas, in this case, examining how new and disruptive developments disturb the prevalent status quo of existing markets and dominate players in a market. Much of this business literature is focused on mass consumer markets, and space has always been a very different type of commercial activity, as we shall consider later. One geostationary satellite launch can cost over US$250 million, not including the satellite that can cost much more than that [5]. But the theory of disruptive technologies allows us to view space and the current revolution(s) in the space domain from a very different and useful perspective.

There are many different views about all this, but a good working definition of our topic is: a disruptive technology is one that fundamentally alters the status quo of both the competitive market space, as well as altering the market position of the dominant technology and who controls that market. A new, disruptive technology can simply replace the existing major players in a market segment, but more often, it can bring about totally new markets, applications, and industries that never existed, and it can also redefine the mix of dominant players in these markets in rapid fashion.

There are many, well known examples of this over the past 100 years or more. The development of the telegraph and then Marconi’s (actually Nicola Tesla’s) radio are two good, early examples of totally new disruptive technologies that did not previously exist. These both created completely different ways for people to communicate across vast distances, and both created entirely new businesses, such as Western Union and commercial radio stations, as well as affecting existing markets and dominant businesses like the national post offices of the world. Existing players were affected, often negatively, and a new mix of technologies, businesses, and markets emerged that were fundamentally different from what had existed before. Email and its impact on Western Union and the traditional post office and postal mail is another, similar example. Another wave had arrived.

The list of well-documented cases is long: steam replaced sailing ships, and in their turn, jet commercial aircraft replaced transatlantic passenger steam liners in only a few years; the personal computer, FedEx and overnight package delivery, digital cameras replacing film (does anyone remember Kodachrome and 35 mm SLR cameras?) and there are many, many more examples of this process.

Space has significant differences from most of these examples, which tend to reflect consumer mass market products, and space has not, so far, been seen as a consumer product, at least not quite yet. But there is much that we can learn from these business school studies of this phenomenon that are relevant and important for our understanding of space and the extraordinary changes we are seeing [6].

Often, the new, disruptive innovation that damages established market leaders and that upsets the status quo is not radically new, in and of itself, nor is it necessarily extremely complex or difficult from a purely technological view. This is not always the case. Radio was a totally new and different technology, but FedEx and Uber had no new technological aspects at all; it was rather how the various existing pieces of technology were put together in a new and innovative way to create a new product or service and a new commercial market that competed with existing businesses such as the government-operated post offices and traditional taxi and limo companies.

However, according to the available business school literature, nearly all of these disruptive innovations that have been studied share two important characteristics. First of all, they almost always present a new and different package of performance characteristics. Often, and very interestingly, the new mix is initially less useful or interesting at first, at least to the majority of users. It is fascinating that, more often than not, these new mixes of capabilities are not really recognized or valued at the outset by the general consumer, and, even more importantly, they are not seen by the dominant players in the field to be a significant threat to their market position, and thus they do not initially respond to the threat, often until it is too late. This was Christiansen’s breakthrough concept.

The second common characteristic of disruptive innovations in the marketplace is that this new mix of capabilities and attributes improves at a very rapid rate. In fact, it is at such a rapid rate that the new technology can quickly gain new customers, overwhelm the dominant players, and can take over existing markets, while also creating entirely new markets that had not existed before. These new innovators can also quickly grow minor, niche markets into major, new mass markets that the dominant players did not consider worth their time when their existing offerings, and expertise, were providing such a good return.

Once a new technology that could revolutionize an existing market or industry emerges, it is a very common thread in these studies that the established major players in the affected market typically see it as not very interesting, and the technology is not initially perceived as a threat to their dominant situation. They are the market leaders and know their market and customers, and ‘own’ their markets. And their traditional analysis will usually show, convincingly, that this is not really something that their existing customer base really wants or needs, and that it is not something that the dominant players need to be concerned about. Part of this is that, initially, the projected mix of benefits is not that good or is quite different from the existing paradigm, the market and profit margins will be small relative to their existing activities, and that this would not cover the costs of going after this new opportunity.

Part of this is also hubris, and being ‘fat and happy’ market leaders. The view often looks really good from on top. It is also common that, being a new approach, the dominant players do not want to incur the costs associated with what are, at this point, not worth the price, and it will also require new production, marketing, distribution, manufacturing, and management resources in a new area that is considered to be ‘not our core mission’ and that brings with it new additional risk and uncertainty. After all, customers are not screaming for this new thing (at least not yet). And this is also a new technology or application that we really do not completely understand, we do not have the right people for, and we didn’t think it up anyway. It is probably just a fad and not really as good as what we offer. We know what we are doing. Ignore it and it will go away.

So as a result of these very understandable, very human, and totally predictable reasons, the new, soon to be disruptive innovation and technology tends to be dismissed, ignored, or actively rejected in favor of continuing to do what the market leaders know best, what that they have been very successful in doing all along.

However, rather quickly, another company; a smaller, more agile one, less invested in the existing paradigm, comes along and sees the potential that the new idea has, or perhaps they brought the concept into existence themselves. And they bring the new technology to the market, or sometimes to a slightly different version of the existing market, or even try to create new and different versions of the market, a small niche that they can occupy and exploit with the limited resources a startup can bring. Slowly, the new business becomes successful, and other, new players catch a whiff of what is going on, and they add their own ideas and different innovations onto the new idea, and much more quickly than the existing market leaders had assumed, the new players keep enhancing and improving the idea, its capabilities, markets, and value to existing customers and start bringing in new ones as well. Customers start to become interested, and money begins to flow into the small startups, and this draws the attention of others, including investors and money looking for the next big thing. What this does is to raise the benefits and performance in ways that mainstream customers begin to recognize and value. New users are added, and in a rapidly spinning cycle, the disruptive technology rises past the perceived benefits of the existing paradigm and becomes a serious challenge to the status quo.

By the time this has happened, it is often too late for the existing paradigm and market leaders to respond effectively. There are multiple, interlocking, and complex reasons for this, but it is a mix of business philosophy and perceptions, psychology, personal skills and knowledge bases, economic realities, risk strategies, market changes, and much more. Another very common feature of this process is that, in the end, it is most common that the existing market leaders fight back rather than adopt the new ideas and approaches. They fight back with advertising, with minor improvements to ‘refresh’ their existing offerings, and more.

At first their responses are minor and without great investment, but as the cycle turns, and they realize the risk, they invest more resources to maintain their position and the old paradigm. They may try to buy out or otherwise kill off their new upstart competition, or they may file lawsuits and patent infringement suits and try to lawyer the threat away, or even seek political pressure to address the threat. They do this through new regulations or legislation limiting the new idea, trade tariffs or other, less ‘soft’ means. Sometimes it gets nasty. They do not give up easily, but they tend to fight rather than adopt. If they do try to adopt, often their efforts are grounded in the existing paradigm, and these often are not successful.

Ultimately, the paradigm shifts, consumer desires change, and the existing companies are overtaken. Jobs are lost, businesses and factories are closed, and the world moves on. People can’t imagine how they lived before without the new whatever it is. The fascinating thing is that this pattern has occurred over and over again, and people make the same mistakes in the same general patterns again and again. This raises fascinating questions about how people think and how organizations react, how they perceive threats, and how they make decisions in response to rapidly evolving threats and changes. But it is the broad patterns that interest us the most in this context, and how this is relevant to the current situation in the space domain.

The S-Curve

Christensen also introduced the concept of the S-curve as a way to graphically describe this disruptive process, and this has become a commonly used way to represent the process of disruptive innovation in the marketplace. It appears now in many books and articles and is a simple but effective way of representing this recurring pattern. Figure 1.1 shows an example of this S-curve. You can see that it represents a series of continuous, overlapping and intersecting S-shaped curves that each represents an iteration of a market or technology and its natural lifespan. The line in red shows the initial introduction of a new technology or product, which initially is less effective or widely adopted than the existing market leader, represented by the gray line. There is, at first, an initial performance gap and lack of interest. The red line then takes off and replaces the previous paradigm, and enjoys its period of ascendancy. But then, at the top of the diagram, you see the initial introduction of the next, new disruptive innovation, in blue, into this market segment. You can see that there is, again, an initial performance gap between the two just as there was at the bottom, but at some point the new future system begins to overtake the existing, red paradigm, and the cycle repeats itself again. The small insert in green shows the pattern repeating over and over again.

Fig. 1.1

The S-curve. (Based on Nahler & Gronauer (2015) [7]. Graphics courtesy of ResearchGate Commons.)

Although this is, clearly, a simplified representation of very complex realities, the recurring patterns of S-curves provides a useful model for the process of recurring introduction and replacement of existing solutions and technologies that we are concerned with here. Each curve, each new technology, has its own natural cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and decline. Floppy drives, anyone? Text me on your BlackBerry if you can’t find one.

The Gartner Hype Cycle, the Valley of Death, and Resurrection on the Other Side

Another related way to visualize new and innovative technologies and their process of introduction and potential for the future is represented by the Gartner Hype cycle, with its variation on this S-curve theme. The Gartner Hype cycle is a trademarked, proprietary concept and represents a slightly more complex way of representing the various phases of how technologies are introduced [8]. You can see at left that the Y axis represents expectations, and below, on the X axis, time is represented. We see five different ‘zones’ in time, representing the stages through which a new technology becomes established in a marketplace.

The cycle begins with a technological trigger and a period of rising, perhaps unrealistic, expectations, followed by a peak of inflated expectations and unrealistic hype. This is inevitably followed by a descent into a trough of disillusionment, also referred to as the ‘valley of death,’ where there is a major shake out and consolidation. At this point, only a small number of users have adopted the new tools, and the situation is very unstable for those who are trying to keep their businesses alive. Then we see a slow climb out, where second and third generation products become established and, finally, enter into a plateau of productivity where the innovation and its products and companies become established in the marketplace and the businesses that survived gain maturity and stable markets (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Gartner’s Hype curve. The Trough of Disillusionment is also called the Valley of Death [9]. (Graphic from https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Creative_​Commons.)

Gartner produces tailored versions of this curve for numerous technologies and market segments, including the space sector; all are available for a commercial fee. There have been criticisms of this approach, and some critics have suggested that several recent examples of disruptive innovations have not followed this type of a process at all, and that the curve is not applicable in all cases. But it is a useful concept in general, and in relation to the current space industry changes that we are seeing today.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, we can see that there has developed over the past decades an academic framework for the analysis of disruptive technologies and innovations. This approach has initially focused on mass consumer markets, but it has significant benefits in our consideration of how these are going to impact the space sector.

We can also see that this pattern has occurred many times in the past, at least since the Industrial Revolution, and that there are multiple recurring patterns. Many market leaders react as if this has never happened before, and many do all the right things, from a traditional business perspective, and yet they are swamped by the new wave.

In the next chapter, we will review in detail some case studies of traditional disruptive innovations, to better understand this process and how it has worked in the past.

References

1.

Nitecki, Matthew H. and Nitecki, Doris V. (1994). Origins of Anatomically Modern Humans. Springer.

2.

Lenski, Gerhard E. (1974). Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. ISBN 978-0-07-037172-9.

3.

Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.

4.

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

5.

Werner, Debra (10 October 2018). Price swings expected during launch industry shakeout. SpaceNews. Retrieved 20 October 2018.

6.

Van de Veen, E. J., Giannoulas, D., Guglielmi, M, Uunk, T. and Schubert, D. Disruptive Space Technologies in International Journal of Space Technology Management and Innovation, 2 (2), 24-39, July-December 2012. https://​elib.​dlr.​de/​86782/​1/​IJSTMI%20​-%20​Disruptive%20​Space%20​Technologies.​pdf

7.

Nahler, Horst, and B. Gronauer (2015) From a Toolbox to a Way of Thinking-An integrated View on TRIZ. https://​www.​researchgate.​net/​publication/​287646024

8.

Fenn, Jackie & Mark Raskino (2008). Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time. Harvard Business Press. ISBN 978-1-4221-2110-8.

9.

https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Hype_​cycle#/​media/​File:​Hype-Cycle-General.​png

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Scott MadryDisruptive Space Technologies and InnovationsSpace and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22188-1_2

2. Case Studies of Traditional Disruptive Technologies

Scott Madry¹ 

(1)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run and often in the short one, the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

– Arthur C. Clarke

This chapter will present several well-known business case studies of traditional disruptive technologies and their origins, process, and impact.

The first will be the automobiles and mass industrial production techniques introduced by Henry Ford. The second case study will be the introduction of the shipping container and intermodal transportation in the maritime shipping industry. The final one will be more familiar to you all, the development of the smartphone by Apple and Steve Jobs. There are many, many others, but these three will serve our purpose of setting the stage for the space era’s own versions of disruptive innovations.

Case Study #1: The Creation of the Mechanized Transportation Revolution

For many thousands of years of human history, nothing relating to people could move faster than a horse could run. Since the most ancient days, people had an intimate working relationship with domesticated horses and relied on them for transport, the movement of goods, war and conquest, working the fields, and more. The first good evidence of horse domestication comes from chariot burials dating back to some 4,000 years ago on the vast Asian steppes. Civilizations as disparate as the ancient Persian and Roman empires created dedicated systems of roads and messengers. Herodotus, the 5th century b. c. Greek historian, wrote that There is nothing in the world that travels faster than these Persian Couriers, who were called the Pirradazis back in the 5th century b. c. The Angareion (Ἀγγαρήιον in ancient Greek) was the system of Persian royal mounted couriers that operated over a series of over 100 post stations across over 2,700 km of roads, stretching all the way from the Ionian sea of what is now western Turkey to the Persian Gulf, between the ancient cities of Susa to Sardis. A series of riders could cover this vast distance in only 7 days, an astonishing feat [1]. It was also Herodotus who wrote about them that Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, the very same famous phrase that was much later attributed to the U. S. Post Office.

The ancient Romans later adopted and improved on the Persian messenger concept and created the ancient world’s most complete system of paved roads in antiquity that spanned the entire Roman empire, from the Middle East to the Scottish border in Britain. The major roads all had stage relay houses about 30 km apart, located at regular intervals with fresh horses, beds and food for the official couriers of Rome. All others had to pay to stay at commercial inns, but all could use the roads without cost. This system was called the cursus publicus, or ‘the public way,’ and could speed a message a distance of up to 80 km in a single day between the various stage houses, which were called mansions [2]. The system remained in place in the Eastern (Byzantine) empire of Constantinople all the way up to the late 6th century a. d. But no human or message could move faster than a fast horse and rider for another 1,200 years.

Up to the early 1900’s, around the time of the First World War, a horse and buggy or light two or four-wheeled carriage was the most common means of travel in much of Western Europe, North America, and around the world. A single horse could pull a simple buggy costing only US$25 or $30, and it was easily set up and driven by anyone, including the elderly and older children. These simple buggies, also known as carriages in Europe, were made and sold locally by thousands of local carriage-builders; they lasted for decades and required nothing but a single horse or pony for power. These simple machines provided cheap, reliable, and efficient transportation for people and light goods around the world, requiring only the most basic of roadways