Research by Juniper Networks points to a great emphasis on technologically savvy business leaders as the need to stay ahead of disruptive technology and IT infrastructure increasingly becomes tied to business success.

Alan Jones, a start-up evangelist at start-up accelerator BlueChilli, said it is integral that businesses have executives who understand technology.

"If you are not investing in disruptive technology in your industry then you're going to be disrupted by somebody who is fairly shortly," he said.

The rise of technology has allowed small businesses and start-ups to quickly scale their businesses and threaten industries in a way that was largely unprecedented before the technological evolution that began in the 1990s.

Mr Jones, who was previously part of the team that brought Yahoo! Inc to Australia, said this is something that he has seen in the past with the rise of online advertising in the 1990s.

"At that time we were going to traditional advertising agencies and saying online advertising is going to disrupt your industry ... Back then people didn't believe us, but we were right," he said.

Fear of disruption

The threat of disruptive technology is something that has been echoed across industries. A Juniper Network survey found 22 per cent of business decision makers and almost a third of IT business decision makers expected a disruptive technology, product or service to arrive in their industry within the next year.

Yet both parties were pessimistic about their company's current ability to adapt to a technological, product or service disruption.

Half of business decision makers expected it would take more than a year for their business to respond to the disruption, while 46 per cent of IT decision makers agreed.

"You see again and again massive disruption being created by relatively small, relatively new businesses. They're high growing and reaching the global market rapidly," Mr Jones said.

"The message to the incumbents in each of those industry sectors is: you need to learn how to do that same innovation yourselves or you will fall prey."

Professor Peter Gahan, director of the Centre for Workplace Leadership, said this has led to business leaders and management constantly thinking about how they can innovate.

"It does have a significant consequence for the leadership and management when they're expected to think about how they're going to innovate their production and work processes when they may not necessarily have those same technical skills," he said.

Juniper Networks found that of the 1800 IT respondents surveyed, 90 per cent said their company would perform better if their senior executives were more technologically savvy.

The feeling that businesses would perform better with tech savvy individuals in charge spread across a variety of other sectors and industries, with a majority of those surveyed overwhelmingly believing their company would perform better if this were the case.

No guarantee of success

Yet Professor Gahan said that although having technical skills and innovation is important, simply inventing is not enough.

"Just having a bunch of tech heads lead business is not really the whole answer to getting better innovation. You need a blend of those skills and you want to have that blend not necessarily in individual people but within teams of people that are involved in that whole process."

Professor Gahan said whilst technological skills are important in a team, business skills will always be integral to success and balance is required.

"They might be good inventors but they might not be good at creating successful innovations because they don't have the background in operational and organisational process."

Airbnb and Uber have led the way in recent years, disrupting industries with technological advancements, and Mr Jones said we can expect this pattern to repeat.

"Airbnb now has more hotel rooms than any hotel chain, Uber has more cars on the road than any transport company and we see again and again this kind of disruption going on," he said.

"In every industry sector you can imagine there are 100 or 200 little start-ups nobody has heard about yet but in five years one or two of them will have completely blown that market up and taken control."

But Mr Jones said it is important that people don't buy into "the myth of start-ups" and discount the value of business skills.

"A lot of people are attracted to what they think the start-up industry is because they buy into the myth that if you have a good enough product, you can make a lot of business and marketing mistakes but the product will make the business a success," he said.

"There's really a lot more about building a business behind a start-up than there is behind building a product."

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