University Name, SBM4301: Innovation and New Technologies Report

This report provides a comprehensive overview of current trends in technological innovation, emphasizing the importance of staying ahead in a rapidly changing business environment. It discusses the increasing pressure on companies to prioritize innovation, highlighting the role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. The report delves into blockchain technology, explaining its definition, major concepts, applications, benefits, and potential barriers to adoption. It explores the advantages of blockchain, including increased transparency, security, and cost reduction, while also acknowledging potential risks and challenges. The report concludes by emphasizing the significant impact of technological innovation on businesses, consumers, employment, and nations, while also addressing the potential negative impacts and risks associated with these advancements.

Running Head: INNOVATION AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
INNOVATION AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Current Trend on Technological Innovation..........................................................................3
Block Chain as Current Technological Innovation................................................................4
Blockchain Adoption Benefits and the Barriers.....................................................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
Reference....................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
The parade of scientific breakthroughs and new technologies is relentless and it is
unfolding on the various fronts. The pace of technological change had profound impact
across almost every industry. In current situation, it is not sufficient to keep atop of the
emerging technologies instead keeping ahead of them. An era is emerging where the
organizations are not only concerned about innovations for sustaining business, but they are
also concerned with how to disrupt other with the innovations. This is increasingly becoming
threat, which has led to quote that either “disrupt or be disrupted” (Boccardi et al. 2014).
Technological innovation is successful implementation of the technical idea that is
new to organization that creates it. It is the process, where company embarks in journey that
identifies technology importance as innovation source as critical success factor for the
increased competitiveness of market. The current and emerging technological innovation is
influencing the population of organization profoundly by disrupting the markets, challenging
capabilities of organizational learning, changing relative resources importance and altering
competition basis (Pantano 2014). The example of emerging trends of technological
innovations are artificial intelligence, blockchain, cybersecurity, internet of things and
various others, one of which will be described broadly later in discussion part. These
emerging technologies trends have great impact on the operations of the business (Rotolo,
Hicks and Martin 2015). Hence, this report will discuss the current trends on technological
innovation. In order to identify relevant information on the topic, different recent articles and
scholarly research on topic will be evaluated.

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Discussion
Current Trend on Technological Innovation
Most of the companies are prioritizing innovation as the key to their strategy of
business. The exponential changes are accelerating pace of the business. According to the
technology decision-makers, their business pace is faster today compared to the five years
before. It helps in giving pressure for driving the companies to value innovation, setting-up
the teams of innovation and lastly, tasking these teams applies emerging technologies. The
investment on emerging technology has superseded the understanding of customer as number
one thing companies’ wants to do for being more innovative (Ho et al. 2014).
Emerging technologies is going to be more important to future of the business. The
companies need this to compete and survive. However, doing so will bring key challenges,
which organizations face, while applying emerging technology for innovating. Disruptive
innovations could be hard for the employees for embracing because most of the humans fear
the changes, particularly ones, which disrupt existing goals, deliverables and processes. The
top five barriers include tactical or the risk averse culture, fear of changes, budgetary impacts
of the innovation funding, tactical business metrics and objectives and fear of failure
(CeArley et al. 2016).
In coming years, evolving and new ways of wrangling data will be taking center stage
in company. Innovations in the edge computing, artificial intelligence and software robots
will be leveraged increasingly for the competitive advantage as companies looks to efficiently
and quickly look at the data for making better decisions of business. The companies that fails
for anticipating these as well as the other emerging trends risk the rapidly accelerating
existential crisis (El Kadiri et al. 2016).

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Block Chain as Current Technological Innovation
Almost a decade ago in 2009, the technology of blockchain made its first official
appearance. It was since then; world has seen exponential transformation in this amazing
technology. Blockchain is defined as distributed ledger and decentralized system in which
network of the decentralized nodes or devices, each hold copies of all data in chain. When it
is updated, member device verifies work of previous in chain. Blockchain is ledger of the
transactions in network (Abeyratne and Monfared 2016). This is decentralized means it is not
stored in the single location. The participants involved in the network themselves confirms
transactions or the blocks. Hence, in this trusted third-party intermediary is not required.
Blockchain is having robust applications in the supply chain, payments as well as voting.
Blockchain is emerging technology, which secure and simplifies transactions among the
parties. However, there are various misunderstandings regarding new technology as it poses
some risks, the boards need to understand these risks, potential opportunities and impacts on
strategy of company (Nowiński and Kozma 2017).
Blockchain is made on the 4 major concepts. This is distributed ledger; hence every
participant in the network is having simultaneous access to view information. The functions
of cryptography help in ensuring that security and integrity of information. Participants
confirms the changes directly with each other. It replaces need for the third party for
authorizing transactions. It runs additional logic of business, which allows agreements on as
well as automatic enforcement of the expected behavior of asset or transaction rooted in
blockchain that are known as a smart contract (Pilkington 2016).
Altogether, these concepts help in creating powerful opportunities for displacing
reliance on the central intermediaries or trust actions, which includes retailers, brokers,
lawyers and bankers. The other advantage of blockchain includes greater transparency and
security and more precise transactions tracking, along with the permanent ledger of the

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activity. These advantages are expected to decrease the companies’ cost. There is existence of
various blockchains and everyday more are being created. It is open for everyone that is
public or for the controlled group that is private. One of the recognized public blockchain is
one, which underlies the cryptocurrency bitcoin. As stated by Don and Alex Tapscott,
“blockchain is first native digital medium for the value, just as internet was first native digital
medium for the innovation” (Tapscott and Tapscott 2016).
The integrity of the blockchain hinges on strong cryptography, which validates as
well as chains together the transactions blocks with the hashes. Each of the new blocks
includes hash of prior block that makes it impossible to interfere with the individual record of
transactions without being detected. A function of hash is algorithm, which converts inputs of
the numbers and letters into encrypted output of fixed length (Kiviat 2015).
Blockchain does not offers only opportunities, but this technology includes risks as
well. This is still emerging technology, which requires to be proven prior to scaling for
broader use. Blockchain themselves is having unique features of security; hence, there would
be major risks in case, if environment of IT surrounding the technology of blockchain is
having serious weaknesses. The system that is designed poorly can makes it susceptible to the
cybercrimes. Further, there are also apprehension regarding personal identity and data
privacy risks (Crosby et al. 2016). In public blockchains case, typically the users are
identified by the pseudonyms, which does not lead to sharing of personal information, while
encrypting transactions. It helps in protecting personal identities of users. However, this
anonymity could enable the criminal behavior that creates haven for financial crimes
perceptions. Moreover, in private blockchains case, the group that manages the code of chain
determines the way participants are involved. These are the risks that needs to be considered
against potential and security for the fraud in blockchain systems (Yeoh 2017).

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The research shows that technology of blockchain could add almost $300-$400 billion
of the annual economic value globally by end of 2027. Entities in industry of financial
services have adopted the technology of blockchain at first. This industry has focused on two
different areas, which includes infrastructure and cryptocurrencies. The infrastructure
solutions considered blockchain technology for replacing the decades-old infrastructure
around the networks for exchange and trading transactions (Morabito 2017). Further,
applications of cryptocurrencies include digital wallets, payments and trading. These changes
will be reducing costs, fraud and risks that are inherent in the validation of traditional
transaction and management of ledger. Blockchains eliminate version control issues,
redundancy and delays, which are standard in the current system of banking because
processing of each core transaction is just once in the single shared electronic ledger. The
technology of blockchain can be used in the stock exchanges, post-trading activity, the
mortgage industry ang cross-border trade (Nguyen 2016).
The activity of blockchain is expanding beyond the industry of financial services. For
instance, the entities in healthcare, manufacturing, shipping, automotive and consumer goods
and others are exploring uses of this technology. Not only these sectors, the other sectors, for
instance, supply chain management, product origin tracking and logistics are developing the
applications for security, authenticity and goods traceability (Morabito 2017).
Blockchain Adoption Benefits and the Barriers
As collaborative technology, the blockchain provides great ability for dramatically
improving processes of business, which occurs between and within entities. Immutability of
data stored in the blockchains helps in providing level of the transparency and trust. This also
helps in allowing greater transparency and accurate tracking. It helps in reducing fraud and
risks. There are various entities that have anticipated significant reduction in cost for the

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recordkeeping and transactions. By using single distributed ledger, effort and time can be
eliminated, which goes into reconciling different versions (Ahram et al. 2017).
However, just like with the new technology, there includes barriers for its adoption.
For the successful blockchain, broad adoption is required, where enough parties are using
either same platform of underlying blockchain or any interoperable platforms. It means
further development as well as adoption of the specifications and standards. Some of the
entities may be required to overhaul their current system, whereas others may be required to
integrate the technology of blockchain with the legacy infrastructure. Hence, both requires
sufficient money and time. The other challenge includes scaling blockchain for processing
significantly higher transactions volume. Further, there is great uncertainty around regarding
the way technology is regulated (Abeyratne and Monfared 2016).
There are also questions regarding the way controls are implemented for ensuring that
individuals doing transactions are trustworthy. In the absence of this, system itself and
actions recorded cannot be trusted and the consequences could be worse. It is because ledger
is tamper-proof, there are some people who are in thought that they are in the fully-protected
environment. However, the more autonomous blockchain becomes, there would be more
risks (Yeoh 2017).
Conclusion
Therefore, this report concludes without any doubt that innovations plays major role
in addressing the challenges of global development. It is not only seen as important, but also
intrinsically positive. The organizations can reduce its costs by the help of economies of scale
that have positive effects on the its efficiency. Further, disruptive technologies are having
different implications for the entities, consumers, employments and the nations. The
consumers are poised to benefit most from this, because new technologies allow free or

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cheaper and more sophisticated services and goods to emerge. The effect on employment
includes workplace flexibility and increased efficiency. The firms get the advantage from the
savings from labor cost by increased efficiency of labor and transitions of tasks to the
machines and computers that can capitalize on the disruptive trends with the help of moving
into the markets and products. Lastly, nations can get the benefit from of high skilled and
educated populations, access to the high affordable and quality higher education and safety
nets and social programs, for instance unemployment reskilling and assistance. Hence,
technology advancement is changing the way of living, working and doing business.
Disruptive technologies create more value compared to existing technology and it is having
potential to increase economic output. However, technological innovation and the disruptive
technologies not only creates positive impact, but it also negatively impacts the business and
society such as increased risks of security by using technology in business. The risk of cyber-
crime has been increased, where some of the malicious people are indulge in stealing
information of consumer and business, which ultimately is costing millions of dollars to
companies.

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Reference
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using distributed ledger. International Journal of Research in Engineering and
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Ahram, T., Sargolzaei, A., Sargolzaei, S., Daniels, J. and Amaba, B., 2017, June. Blockchain
technology innovations. In 2017 IEEE Technology & Engineering Management Conference
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Boccardi, F., Heath, R.W., Lozano, A., Marzetta, T.L. and Popovski, P., 2014. Five
disruptive technology directions for 5G. IEEE Communications Magazine, 52(2), pp.74-80.
CeArley, D., Burke, B., Searle, S. and Walker, M.J., 2016. Top 10 strategic technology trends
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Nguyen, Q.K., 2016, November. Blockchain-a financial technology for future sustainable
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