The New Roaring Twenties

In the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler asks, “Does history rhyme? A century ago, the ’20s boomed, driven by consumer spending on homes, cars, radios and newfangled appliances like refrigerators, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. Most Americans couldn’t afford the upfront cost of a lot of these goods, so manufacturers and retailers invented installment plans.” The Roaring Twenties were shaped by innovations in consumer goods and financial services. 

Kessler speculates on what will make the 2020s roar. AI? Digital diagnostics in healthcare? CRISPR gene editing? 5G? Edge computing? True virtual education? 3D printing in construction? 

All of these technologies are on the cusp of commercialization, and all have the potential to disrupt various industries. Which ones will have a major impact in the decade ahead? 

In our work on disruptive technologies for a major agritechnology company, we examined how different technologies are accepted by different industries. We came across this survey of household acceptance rates for consumer innovations. 

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-100-year-march-of-technology-in-1-graph/255573/ 

The uptake of each of these technologies created new ways of living, working and doing business. Automobiles shaped the layouts of our cities and our regions. Telephones let us do business and maintain relationships over long distances. Refrigerators changed how we bought food, which changed the industries of growing, processing and distributing it. The adoption and eventual convergence of computers, the Internet, and cellphones has even changed how we walk down the street. 

No one can predict the future with certainty, but the graph gives clues to technology adoption that should apply to innovation in the 2020s. One thing we can predict for sure: the rate of technology uptake keeps getting faster, so we can expect that the 2020s will experience several major technological disruptions. 

Here’s to the 2020s – let’s hope that they go down in history as the New Roaring Twenties.