Why Innovation is a Necessity for Software based Product and Service Companies

The rapid rate of change enabled by software make this industry more vulnerable than most to the falling behind on the innovation curve. This problem has only accelerated in recent years as the number of disruptive technologies have grown at an exponential rate fueled by the growing size of the market and the number of software engineers. The open source community has been a driving source of disruptive technologies such as big data Hadoop and Spark, JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React, and machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow. Software based companies who do not embrace these disruptive technologies face the ever-increasing risk of being pushed aside by those that do. To make this even more challenging, the skills required to enhance the current product and the skills required to innovate using new disruptive technologies are different.