Disruptive Innovation: Why Now?

Through an extensive research process, we have identified five transformative disruptive innovation platforms that could change the way the world works and become the critical productivity signposts that future historians identify. We believe that historians will look back on this era as one of unprecedented technological foment. They will see critical inflections in artificial intelligence and DNA sequencing and editing; they will recognize this as the 10 year stretch when robotics proliferation became inevitable and when the battery became the fundamental unit of energy delivery; and they will identify in blockchain and cryptocurrencies the roots of the structure that would grow to upturn the entire business and financial landscape.

In our latest white paper, we revisit the impact of past transformative technologies in order to put today’s technological moment into context. Given the magnitude of the technological impulse we are anticipating, aggregate equity market capitalizations could appreciate at a more rapid rate than historically has been the case, as the exponential growth associated with innovation increases average returns. That said, the sagging returns from traditional businesses being disrupted or destroyed by transformative technologies could be a significant drag on portfolios exposed to broad-based benchmarks.

According to our estimates, the five technologically enabled disruptive innovation platforms should generate more than $50 trillion in business value and wealth creation over the next 10-15 years. Today, they account for less than $6 trillion in global equity market capitalization, giving investors an opportunity to capitalize by almost 10-fold if they have positioned their portfolios on the right side of innovation.

Given the opportunities and threats that each of these disruptive innovation platforms poses, we discuss each in more details in this report. To download the full white paper, please click below: