Prof. McGahan (BC and HBS) has written an interesting book on how industries evolve and how a business executive can identify those trends and make $ out of it.
These are the key insights from the book,
1. 4 types of industry evolution patterns - Progressive (retail), Creative (pharma), Radical (fedex) and Intermediating (financial brokers).
2. These rules can be applied across core assets or core activities.
3. Two categories of phases of changes - [Fragementation, shakeout, maturity, declining]or [Emergence, Convergenc, Co-Existence and Dominance]
4. Her prescriptive approach to apply it to the industry,
- Identify what is your industry
- Determine Evolutionary Trajectory
- Determine nature of change - architectural/foundational
- Determine phase of change
- Apply principles of competition for each type
5. 2 kinds of tradeoffs - Leading vs. Following, Repositioning vs. Sustaining.
As you can well see these perspectives are not driven from lot of data and hard stats but more conjectures and hypothesis that are not well proven. I am not sure using this approach will help you make $ of money of these trends but it can get you tenureship at the local university.
FGS