The benefits of technological transitions. Biofuel, cotton and oilseeds.

What’s happening to agriculture?
The benefits of technological transitions.
David Tribe, December 2005

I call the points where a rapidly developing technology takes off and starts to displace its predecessor ``technological transitions.'' These are perilous times, but they are the times when great industries are founded. Rarely do leaders of the last technology play a significant role in the next; they've usually become encumbered with a bureaucratic superstructure focused on managing a mature market but incapable of acting on the small scale with the rapid pace that's needed to develop its successor--the new market that's inexorably displacing them.

John Walker, Founder of Autodesk Inc.


Drought, low commodity prices, dumping by overseas competitors, unfavourable of terms of trade, barriers against entry into overseas markets, outbreaks of crop destroying plant disease, to mention a few. There are plenty of problems for Australian primary producers to worry about, and it’s easy to understand why some threats might be pushed to the background by more urgent distractions. Against this background, technological change can easily become just one more of these background issues, but this would be a serious strategic mistake, because massive global investment in biotechnology is triggering several major technological transitions in agriculture. Even though these are slow revolutions, they are still highly disruptive.

As with the telegram, the typewriter, the floppy disk, the land line telephone, and the snail-mail letter, all technologies have finite life spans, and are vulnerable to displacement from the market by disruptive new techniques and innovations. If technological innovation is not embraced, it only moves faster somewhere else.

This article on technological transitions goes on to describe disruptive but beneficial technological transitions occurring in the biofuel, cotton, and oilseed sectors, and the economic implications of these for the farming sector in Australia.

Published in Institute of Public Affairs Review Volume 57 No 4, pages 23-23 December 2005

See also Jesse Ausubel posting