Disruptive or just different?

[Dave Birch] I’ve been reading an interesting paper by Jan Ondrus at HEC Lausanne about technology foresight. His multi-user, multi-criteria approach maps the criteria applied by different stakeholders and their evaluation of new technology. If I’ve understood correctly — and I may not have — it recognises that technology adoption is driven by groups of stakeholders (eg, banks and telcos) rather than by any one group alone, because everything is interconnected today. The reason I was looking at it relates to some work we are doing for a client concerning new NFC-based mobile applications, and Jan happens to use the combination of smart cards, contactless cards and NFC as a specific example (albeit limited to Switzerland) with a large set of stakeholders: banks, mobile operators, retailers, IT suppliers, transit systems and so on.

Technorati Tags: contactless, mobile, nfc

The research confirms our suspicion that the combination of mobile and contactless is substantially more disruptive in the payments space that either technology is by itself. While different groups of stakeholders have different technology preferences, it’s NFC that gets the “transferable vote” if you see what I mean. Thus, as a group, the stakeholders will co-operate to make NFC a success even though it may not be the no.1 choice of all of them.

Incidentally, if any of you hip groovers out there will be coming along to the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park tomorrow, I’ll see you there and we can together enjoy a number of popular beat combos, including Faithless and Kelis (and before you ask, no I don’t know who they are either: the last band I saw live was Hawkwind). Consult Hyperion have developed some NFC applications for O2 and they are being used for the first time at the event.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]