With fall trade-show season just behind us, many service providers are left to synthesize the recent wave of technology innovation into practical terms that can positively impact their businesses. By positive impact on the business, we mean either new or adjacent capabilities that can foster top-line revenue growth and/or an innovative solution that optimizes workflow to reduce cycle-time and increase speed and quality, ultimately reducing cost.

With that in mind, we believe that technology investments should be considered both in terms of the value of new and improved services to our customers these investments enable along with the positive impact they will have over time on both your top line and bottom line. In this article, we discuss both technology adoption and emerging and disruptive technologies that might provide a positive impact for service providers. We also explore areas of opportunity for print services providers that leverage the latest technologies and address emerging trends we see in the market.

Disruptive technologies, a term coined by Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School (1997), are innovative technologies that change the way we work by creating new market opportunities that eventually displace or disrupt the norm. Disruptive technologies don't come along very often; they can enable tremendous opportunity, but also considerable risk. Adopting them often requires a shift in mindset and significant operational changes. For example, production inkjet technology has proven to be disruptive since it changes the market opportunity for print, yet considerable planning is required when implementing this technology, especially in environments that were primarily analog, since it requires a streamlined workflow that will keep the press busy in order to gain a reasonable return on an expensive investment.