Is the Pace of Business Really Increasing?

In his Innovation Matters blog, Richard Veryard expresses skepticism regarding whether the pace of technological change is really accelerating:

I have always been wary of the common belief that technological change is accelerating.  I think this belief derives from a combination of proximity, selectivity and distorted perception.  I think we can sometimes be disproportionately impressed by the glamour of recent technology, and misled by the commercially-driven measures of intellectual property (such as volumes of patent activity and product releases).

He makes a fair point.  I do suspect that our perspectives can distort our perception of pacing.  After all, time seems to run much more slowly to my 10 year-old than it does for me.  Is the pace of life really accelerating just because I'm aging?

Nevertheless, researchers such as Charles Fine present persuasive evidence that the pace of change varies across industry. That is, industry clockspeed varies quite significantly. Fine's multi-dimensional approach to measuring clockspeed suggests that substantial changes occur in high clockspeed industries every 2 to 4 years, while similarly substantial changes occur, on average, in slow clockspeed industries every 10 to 20 years.

Furthermore, I find Stephan Haeckel's logic persuasive:

Because the information component of product can change faster, it will change faster.  Because information can be rapidly disseminated, it will be rapidly acquired by others.  As a result, product life cycles will continue to shrink, and the pace of change will continue to accelerate.

The average product life cycle in high information content businesses including movies, novels, high fashion clothing, and consumer electronics devices can be very short.  All fall into the fast-clockspeed category per Fine's accounting.  (However, high information content doesn't always lead to fast clockspeed.  The barriers to entry to the commercial aircraft and computer operating systems businesses, for example, slow industry clockspeed dramatically.)  I also understand that research by Haim Mendelson and Ravindran Pillai confirms that the measured clockspeed of a wide range of industries is accelerating.

An industry's average product life cycle is but one indicator of clockspeed and is, no doubt, incomplete.  Furthermore, proximity may very well distort our perception of clockspeed.  And, as Veryard suggests, technological evolution may well be punctuated.  Nevertheless, a decrease in product life cycle is operationally important–"variations and mutations" may not "be remembered in fifty years time," but they are still important to individual businesses and their stakeholders.

(See also Veryard's critique of my Red Queen model.)