Youve probably heard the story of a young man who designed a new computer operating system, and was turned down by IBM for the first rights. That would be Bill Gates, of course.

And did you know that when Marconi, the inventor of Radio, offered the rights to that new technology to the Italian Government in 1894, they turned him down? You see, the new device was only capable of sending a signal a short distance at that time, and was eclipsed by the more popular telephone. No one though it would amount to anything.

Of course today, Microsoft is, well, Microsoft. And Wireless Radio technology has spawned everything from Television to Cellular phones, and is still changing the way we communicate and do business over 100 years later.

These are examples of Disruptive Technologies. Wikipedia defines disruptive technologies as:

"A disruptive technology is a new technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology in the market, despite the fact that the disruptive technology is both radically different from the leading technology and that it often initially performs worse than the leading technology according to existing measures of performance. A disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as more expensive, lower capacity but smaller-sized hard disks did for newly developed notebook computers in the 1980s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has come to replace film photography)".

A thing to note is that disruptive technologies are not disruptive to customers, and often take a long time before they are significantly disruptive to other service providers or manufacturers, so they are often difficult to recognize. Indeed, as studies have shown, it is quite common for incumbent companies to ignore disruptive technologies, since they often compare badly to existing approaches, and the initial markets for a disruptive technology are often very small compared to the main existing market for the incumbent technology.

Even if a disruptive technology is recognized, existing businesses are often reluctant to take advantage of it, since it would involve competing with their existing (and more profitable) technological approach.

This situation exists today with VOIP Communications Technology. VOIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and is rapidly overtaking the traditional Voice Market. Several years ago, when most Internet Connections were Dial- Up, this technology didnt stand a chance against established phone services. However, with the Worldwide proliferation today of High-Speed wired and wireless networks (note: another use of Radio technology), this obstacle is being rapidly eroded.