punctuative! by Matt Winn

You may be wondering why this blog is titled, “punctuative!” Simply put, it’s my preferred term for what many deem “disruptive.”

Every entrepreneur wants to have a disruptive technology. In the investment community, “disruptive” connotes market change, and quite often, a windfall for the change agent. To me, however, the root form, “disruption,” implies a temporary interruption, or as dictionary.com defines it, “an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity.” I’m interested in new continuities, and find a more precise descriptor of the catalyst or agent is “punctuative.” New continuities form when a system in relative stasis is punctuated by some force or event. Mass broadband adoption and flash technology, for instance, have transformed a stagnant online video market into a robust growth engine. Fast food adoption and poor exercise habits are fueling an explosion of chronic disease and obesity that amongst other causes are straining the healthcare system. Surely, these factors will come to a head (the latin “punctuare,” from which punctuate is derived, means “bring to a point”) and a new healthcare model will prevail. The concept is codified in evolutionary biology as “punctuated equilibria,” the “currently favored theory for the fluctuating patterns of evolution observed in the fossil record.” These graphs (from Palomar College) illustrate the theory nicely:

vs.

Instead of the continuous change illustrated in the first graph, scientists have observed periods of stasis followed by rapid times of change, and differentiation, as noted in the second graph. The broader concept follows:

Technical innovation, of course, is accelerating, and so too are the punctuative events/agents. Last week, I attended the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s annual venture conference in Pinehurst, NC, and heard Ray Kurzweil talk about technology trends and the ability to anticipate where technology is headed. Ray is famous for having predicted mass adoption of the Internet long before it was on anyone’s radar by looking at Arpanet growth (see The Age of Intelligent Machines). At the beginning of his presentation, Ray notes, “The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade,” adding, “You now see paradigm shifts within the lifespan of one of your business plans.” He took 15 different lists of key “paradigm shifts” (tool use, wheel, printing press, etc, I suppose) over the course of our existence and plots them logarithmically to show a remarkably unified view that these shifts are rapidly accelerating. Ray believes that within 15 years we will add more than a year to our life expectancy every year. That’s punctuative! You can download his presentation here. I’m looking forward to reading his newest book, The Singularity is Near.