Old Companies And New Technologies, cont.
The best way to get old companies to really invest in new technologies is to disrupt their marketplace. NBC is never going to invent YouTube. But once YouTube exists, NBC is going to work like mad to compete against it. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing in big corporations like competition from upstarts with disruptive technology.
So if you want ExxonMobil to begin to invest in new energy technologies, present a real threat to the order of their market in the form of disruptive competitors.
The problem is that even then, the innovation from the big, old company will focus on shoring up their current product’s dominance, not on developing entirely new products. They have so much invested in their current product that their innovation has to focus on new ways of using that same product. Anything else would be a waste of their investment.
In other words, any innovation to the energy market from ExxonMobil will revolve around finding ways to continue using oil but doing so more cleanly, and not around replacing oil altogether with other, cleaner technologies.
Big, old companies will never reinvent the world - they’re too preoccupied trying to maintain their dominance over the current one.
