Bob Organ, Director, Northwestern Mutual
Capital, (Marquette University alumnus) gave a lecture in the AIM program on
“Digitialization and its Disruptive Potential” during class on September 2,
2015. He talked about how digitalization
is increasing at an exponential pace and is creating a path for disruptive innovations
(e.g. Uber, Telsa). Mr. Organ also presented a fundamental framework for
understanding this phenomenon and some of the potential effects on consumers
and businesses. He noted that disruptive innovation helps create new markets
and eventually disrupts an existing market - displacing earlier technologies.
After hearing the lecture the students are required to scour
various sources of information (i.e. Bloomberg, FactSet, Wall Street Journal
Business and Technology, The Economist, etc.) to find stories about a business
or technology that they see as having a future
‘disruptive potential’ impact on their industry sector. Here are some examples
of disruptive technologies that were discussed both during and after Mr. Organ’s
visit:
·
Robots
and Drones
·
Crowdsourcing
·
Outer-Space/Asteroid
Mining
·
Hybrid
Electricity Generation and Storage
·
Big
Data
·
Machine
Learning (Artificial Intelligence)
·
Virtual
Reality
·
Digital
Currency
·
Internet
of Things
·
Genetic
Engineering / Cloning
Dr. Krause, AIM Director, commented on the lecture, “This was
a great way to start the semester since Bob and Mike talked about the
implications of disruptive innovation from the perspective of the financial
analyst. They gave the students ideas about how to identify which businesses
and industries that are most susceptible to disruptive moments; how potentially
disruptive technologies can be valued; how to evaluate the disrupted businesses;
and how to avoid missing the key inflation points.”
