Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Disruptive technology is the bearer of tremendous opportunity and equally a harbinger of obsolescence. Technology’s impact on society and business is substantial, if not underestimated. As technology continues to become part of everyday life, it becomes disruptive in how people communicate, work, and connect. The evolution of society and technology happens with or without adaptation or understanding. And, it’s contributing to a very real phenomenon of Digital Darwinism, a situation where organizations are faced with a need to adapt to markets and customer behavior or risk a loss in favor, competitive advantage or worse, irrelevance.

To keep up is a perpetual investment as innovation is constant and it’s only increasing. We are becoming a culture rife with ingenuity. Entrepreneurialism is contagious. The startup way, or the “hacker life” is introducing new mindsets and models and it inspiring all who taste it to code, design, build, invest, and take risks. Even President Obama is calling for attention and support for startups to revive America’s fragile economy. And this is just the beginning. Innovation is a global movement and it’s gaining momentum.

This is a time to take a step back, recognize where we are and where we need to be, examine our strategies and current initiatives, review our investments and opportunities, and consider new areas for change or new pursuits.

The truth is that innovation works for and against us and investing in it with purpose and design is our responsibility. Whether you’re an entrepreneur leading the latest or the next hot startup, a business executive seeking solutions or a competitive edge, a decision maker or a champion for change in any industry, this is the time to see through the chaos of features, trends, IPOs, investments, ballooning valuations, et al. to clear a path for meaningful progress.

Part of the challenge is knowing when to recognize opportunities. While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, there is a gap that exists between current needs, evolving pains, and the myriad of solutions hitting desktops, smartphones, tablets and digital appliances every day. The problem is that many organizations aren’t designed to be adaptive. They’re designed to optimize efficiencies and processes. But, times have changed and disruptive technology isn’t as easy to recognize nor capitalize on without a greater mission and purpose or an infrastructure to identify trends, experiment, learn, and scale.

For example, businesses around the world are jumping on Facebook and Twitter as each have demonstrated an ability to disrupt the standard fair in how connected consumers communicate, discover, and share. Yet, studying how they attempt to engage with customers reveals that they’re missing an opportunity to improve experiences and overall business opportunities. And, if we look at how organizations experiment with emerging platforms such as Instagram, Foursquare, Google+, Klout, and Pinterest, we’re left to wonder whether a divide and conquer strategy really isn’t just another guise where businesses become a jack of all trades but a master of none.

Disruptive technology requires much more than visibility and activity. To master these platforms requires presence and a commitment to steer thoughtful activity within value networks to the benefit of your organization as well as the experiences of those who define it.

For the purpose of this article, let’s define disruptive technology as the innovations that emerge without expectation to introduce a new market and value network at the expense of an existing market and value network. The reason this is an important discussion right now is that many organizations are investing in emerging technology for customer engagement, metrics, marketing and advertising, internal collaboration and education, HR, product develop, etc., without the clearest picture into overall direction, long term strategy, or even a deep understanding of the expectations and obstacles that exist among customers and employees.

To compete for the future, requires a full assessment of how some of the biggest trends in technology impact your business or markets today and how they will influence behavior in the future. While this list may alter, expand or contract based on your industry, the image below should provide a glimpse of just how expansive the landscape is, and while not every technology is affecting the bottom line today, elements are beginning to change the way decisions are made and how people work with one another. At the very least, the golden triangle of cloud, mobile, and social provides a hub to begin the evaluation of both technology and human behavior.

To chart a new course toward relevance, here are five initial steps to consider…

1. Assume that there is a surplus of confusion among users and decision makers within organizations and customers on which technology is trending versus technology that is showing signs of becoming or already is disruptive. Discovering the difference and prioritizing what’s important is critical.

2. Understand that the role of CMO and CIO is becoming closer than ever before. With marketing investing a significant percentage of the overall technology budget now and over time, the “I” in CIO may need to represent innovation to help lead more informed decisions from the inside.

3. Task an existing organization, external partner or develop a new task force to evaluate technology to improve the infrastructure of how your business works, cultivates relationships with customers, employees, and stakeholders, designs better products and services, and demonstrates competitive advantages.

4. Deploy this team to measure technology against a myriad of factors that are important to your business and assess which technologies are worthy of implementation, financial investment, acquisition or experimentation.

5. Re-align the team against a renewed vision, mission and purpose and train employees to use these technologies to achieve desired objectives at the enterprise, LoB, and functional levels…to meet customer and employee expectations and steer delightful experiences.

These are the times when getting caught up in technology, value, and new technology is often mistaken for innovation that inflates the dreaded bubble. What we don’t need is to invest in the wrong technologies simply because posts are constantly written with the “top 10″ ways to grow our business with said platform. While we can watch them grow, the real focus should be on the development of a formal system that measures impact and prioritizes resources around it accordingly.

Social media connectivity and the digitization of news have not squashed American fervor for local news, a Pew study says. Nearly three quarters of adults are consistently plugged into local news — so much so that 32% of survey participants say the loss of local outlets would majorly impact their lives.

A recently published Pew Internet & American Life Project report finds most Americans continue to follow local news. The reliance on local news is consistent in all age groups, though stronger among those who are 40+, and among female consumers.

The younger population, 18 to 39 years old, use the greatest number of local news sources — an average of 4.38 weekly. Older local news followers say they use about two to three different sources a week.

About 80% of adults older than 40 get their news from television broadcasts. Nearly half of the adults surveyed say they regularly use “word of mouth,” the radio and regional newspaper. Besides reading and chatting about their communities, people also stay in-the-know using mobile phones and tablets.

Younger local news enthusiasts, surprisingly also use “word of mouth” to find out about area news and highlights. The connected generation more likely uses Internet news sources including search engines, local newspaper websites, T.V. station websites and social networks.

Individuals who care about local news are characterized as being very connected in their communities. Many have strong roots in their locales; about 32% of the local news consumers surveyed have lived in their community for more than 20 years.

Local news consumers are fans of news in general. About 63%, six in 10 local news consumers, also follow international news consistently, while 78% say they consume national news consistently. One-third of local news enthusiasts say they get everything that need from regional media.

The Pew report suggests local news is not going anywhere yet. Enthusiasts are generationally diverse, using many news sources to learn about their local communities. Americans are turning to local outlets both online and print — though less and less — for news that would affect them including breaking news, politics, crime, business, schools and education.

What role does local news play in your live? Where do you get information about where you live — online or in print? Tell us in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, acousticskyy

Many religions claim that the body is just a vessel for the soul. And at death, the soul doesn’t die, but it leaves the body to go somewhere else. How would that moment feel? Obviously, there’s really no way to know. Or is there?

Faith Condition, by Lukas Franciszkiewicz, is an ongoing project that explores the role of technology in the future of faith. His initial plan was to alter self-perception by “blurring the boundaries between the real and a virtual body.” He wanted to simulate the out-of-body experience, so he built a video rig that used a rear-mounted camera combined with video glasses, to give someone a view of themselves from the outside. Then he improved his system, creating a 3-D image by upgrading to stereoscopic cameras.

“Seeing yourself from behind in an immersive way is a simple method to achieve a disembodied feeling. My awareness during the experiments was that our technological augmentation is already so present that you don’t question what you see,” Franciszkiewicz tells Co.Design. “So instead of experiencing telepresence, I created scenarios for an disembodied sense to think about the implications of technological augmentation of religion.”

Now, in his latest exploration of the project, he’s created a concept video of a futuristic faith device. In it, a person pulls a portable, third-person camera around with them–what Franciszkiewicz calls a “more playful” take on his initial machine–and that camera eventually follows someone to their place of worship, to increase the experience of a world larger than oneself.

It’s a fascinating project, if not for the technical illusion unto itself, then for the idea of technology altering the practices behind faith. It’s hard to imagine a Christian church that would swap out candles for LEDs, for instance, as so much of the Bible’s metaphor is built upon images from 2,000 years ago. But as technology increases our opportunities of perception–as we develop complex interaction models that could improve the immersion of rituals of yore–why not redesign religion to leverage new takes on old ideas?

Or, at minimum, could we at least get a cushier pew?

See the entire project here.