Is the SmartDispenser® disruptive fluid dispensing? There are many, very creative and innovative products like the singing fry pan to be found on this site that showcases modern industrial design, Tuvie. My favorite is the shower/washing machine combination designed to save water. However interesting they may be, none seem really disruptive in the sense that their use will upset the status quo. I first heard the term disruptive, applied to industrial products, while working for a large company. Product line managers used it to describe the introduction of a new product that would greatly upset the staus quo.
The Fishman® SmartDispenser® is proving to be disruptive technology for the fluid dispensing of UV, 2 part epoxies, cyanoacrylates, solders and other fluids used for the assembly of so many products. This is particularly true for those in medical device, LED assembly, fiber optics and electronics assembly. The ability of this Air Free volumetric fluid dispenser to provide the most repeatable adhesive dispense, gather real time production data, Apps for RFID/inventory tracking and integration with an analytical scale, is upsetting the status quo. We see it every day as more and more multinational manufacturers install and connect the SmartDispenser.
Back in 1960 unknown Sony Corp introduced of the transistor TV to replace RCA’s vacuum tube and completely disrupted the way televisions were manufactured, distributed and bought. A more recent example is the interactive textbook reviewed in this article from Inc. Magazine. It will change the way students learn and how companies that produce, publish and sell textbooks do business. IT Business and Gartner Group sent this out today, a nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models
Harvard Professor Clayton Christianson wrote a great book on the subject of disruptive innovation in 1997; 15 years later, a 2012 “disruptive” technology overview with Christianson by Forbes sites Cisco, Toyota and others who have recently missed the mark as to what customers really want/need and can be provided by their competition’s ability to innovate. As Wall St. Journal’s Allen Murray originally said, “That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of ‘bad’ management, but because they followed the dictates of ‘good’ management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations …