Surprise! Your Product Is Obsolete

Imagine working in an industry where one day your product is not just competitive but even leading the market in terms of performance and low manufacturing costs. Orders are streaming in. Customers are happy. Your business is firing on all cylinders.

The next day, you see a headline about a new innovation that makes all existing products on the market obsolete. And then a few days later another. And then another – all touting breakthroughs of products that are leaps and bounds ahead of yours. What does that mean for your roadmap?

Or suppose you are a potential customer considering deployment of this product. You see the headlines, too. Massively improved performance at an equivalent cost? Oh, but the new technology isn’t on the market yet. Do you go ahead with the order you had been planning, or do you wait?

This is exactly the situation faced today by manufacturers and buyers of solar panels. In a matter of weeks, three new technological breakthroughs have been announced including one made of titanium, which tested 1,000 times more powerful than expected, and one made of hydrogen. The most recent announcement, described in an article by ECOticias -El Periódico Verde, is the arrival of the first green photovoltaic cell, developed by Jinko Solar Co., Ltd.. These cells are “miles ahead in terms of efficiency and power output while maintaining almost zero carbon impact on the environment.”

The thing is, in the transition to clean energy, these sorts of breakthroughs are happening all the time in lots of technologies – batteries, wind turbines, wave-powered electricity generators. We may be conditioned to think of technology breakthroughs in terms of Moore’s law (performance doubling approximately every two years). The rate of advance in energy technologies may not approximate the rate of Moore’s Law, but the advance is unrelenting nevertheless.

Science and technology is a single element of the ever-changing context that makes decision-making difficult for enterprises impacted by the energy transition. Other fast-evolving dimensions include public policy, resource availability, institutions, and market systems.

At Tilt Global, we empower organizations navigating the energy transition to make better decisions by analyzing the context in which they are operating to align quickly on strategic decisions while maintaining the humility necessary to watch for changes that require a course correction.