Do you own a fridge? What will replace your fridge in the future? The history of disruption tells us that the fridge won’t just stay in our households for decades to come. And how did the fridge come to be in our households? What previous inventions did it supersede?
These were just some of the many weird and wonderful questions raised at the Singularity University Summit last week. I was lucky enough to attend along with a small group of other under 25s from Deloitte. My favourite talk was that of David Roberts, who discussed the history of disruption.
Consider the spice trade and how historical civilisations in Asia, Northeast Africa and Europe would trade such spices as cinnamon, ginger, pepper and tumeric for the generation of profit. The common explanation for the high demand for spice is that spices masked the taste of spoiled food and, in a time without refrigeration, people would give a lot for the ability to preserve food for longer.
Then, in the 1790s, Fredric Tudor became known for commercialising ice. He was a visionary and a pioneer of the international ice trade. Tudor came up with the crazy idea of cutting ice from New England ponds and shipping it in insulated ships to ports in the Carribean, Europe and India. While Tudor failed multiple times (because the ice would melt), he eventually was successful in shipping ice to destinations around the world, conquering many challenges regarding the cutting, shipping and storing of ice. When the Tudor Ice Company took off, the spice trade went into decline. Ice was the new ingredient for food preservation.
So the spice trade was disrupted by the ice cutting industry, which was then disrupted by the creation of large artificial ice machines, which was disrupted by the ice chest one could buy for their home and this was disrupted by the refrigerator. The interesting thing here is that people in each industry were blind sighted by each wave of disruption.
Had the spice industry realised they were in the food preservation industry, they would have been more concerned about ice.
And so the question is, what will replace the refrigerator? History tells us that the future of disruption is particularly hard to predict, especially if the cause of disruption comes from another industry and not our own. Perhaps in our ever increasing On-Demand Economy, it will be the drone that will replace the fridge - anything you need will be delivered straight to your door at just the right time and in just the right quantity! Or perhaps it will be something else entirely different again. What do you think it will be? And more to the point, what do you think will disrupt your own industry?