Creative destruction

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss creative destruction theory. This is defined as the process by which information and communication technology destroys previous technological solutions and lays waste old companies in order to make room for the new companies. One may think about the creative destruction in recent times, where searches were previously done through sites such as “HotBot, Ananzi Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler” (Schwartz in A look back at the old search engines, 2009.), all which have been replaced by Google. Google is the largest search engine today. Large amounts of data brought about the advent of Internet of Things can mean that there are plenty insights that companies that were affected by the gayle of destruction rarely knew it existed. Companies in the coalface would have had enormous data of people that use it; we think that with the AI-powered analytics, the idea of creative destruction as espoused by Schumpeter (1942) would hold as far as technology is concerned. However, companies that would be pioneers of the time may not necessarily fold and close doors. With regard to the impact of AI to the creative destruction theory, our view is that since data is the new gold, we think that companies that take advantage of AI for the purpose of advanced data analytics would be able to deploy this for the purpose of analysing large amounts of data brought about by the advent of the Internet of Things. Our hypothesis is that the above can only mean that there are plenty of insights for those companies in the coalface; the gayle of destruction in this regard will not bring about new entrepreneurs or new companies but the same companies and insights from data, and predictive analytics will show them which technology is to be destroyed and what it needs to be replaced with. Whatever the replacement will be, it will be based on troves of data, which allows these companies and gives them the competitive advantage to understand their market and where their market is headed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvanced Information and Knowledge Processing
PublisherSpringer
Pages89-94
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Publication series

NameAdvanced Information and Knowledge Processing
ISSN (Print)1610-3947
ISSN (Electronic)2197-8441

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Management Information Systems
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Artificial Intelligence

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