Innovation adoption
Relationship between innovation, consumers and tech maturity
If you work in the field of innovation, you probably sometimes feel like you are living in the future when you have conversations with others. You’re often surrounded by a world of other innovators, who seek to challenge the status quo and shift paradigms.
At the end of the day, an innovation is something new that adds value. In a corporate context, value is added when there is business impact created — this could mean that processes are streamlined, tools are used more effectively, there are significant savings, etc. Because innovation is a risky endeavour, the cost of operating it is quite high: with good innovation management you can reduce the losses but you will never be able to predict whether the innovation will succeed or fail.
At the end of the day, for an innovation to be successful it needs to have a considerable ROI, which means it generally needs to be adopted by a large chunk of the population (else it’s just a cool phase). In that sense, I like the idea of thinking of your innovations in the same way you’d think about a product lifecyle: first you are figuring out what product to build, then you keep iterating / improving to create more and more value for your target customer, and finally you work on increasing your market share.
If you think of innovation in relation to the market, it becomes important to understand the “theory of diffusion” in innovation — illustrated in the diagram below.
First you are figuring out what product to build
For any innovation you put out in the market, there are 2 potential paths:
- A successful “flop” such as the Google Glass, which is trialed by some innovators but never adopted by the general public
- A real innovation success, wherein successive waves adopt the innovation until it reaches its critical mass. Once that is achieved we start taking it for granted (think: email).
As per Figure 1, the curve in red shows where the new users of this innovation lie: It always starts with the innovators, who love crazy ideas, or reside in a research lab. The idea is “to be the 1st”.
At this stage, the innovation is probably expensive and most people don’t really understand what value it brings, so they don’t even bother. As the innovators try it however, if there is some value in the innovation this will appeal to the early adopters.
Keep iterating to create more value for your target customer
The early adopters are nowkeen to test it out too. With a better sense of the product usefulness, this group really plays a big role in helping define potential use cases for the innovation.
The early adopters are also your influencers, those who will influence the early majority to try the innovation — once the majority joins the party your innovation is very likely to be adopted by the late majority.
Work on increasing your market share
Once the late majority is onboard, your innovation has reached a critical mass. Your innovation is going mainstream!
The laggards are often forced to adopt the innovation. They tend to be skeptics and resistant to change. The innovation will rarely adapt to them, unless you are considering extreme users (good design practice).
It is important to note however, that as your user profile shifts from innovators/early adopters to less risk averse folks (the majority) the innovation will start to shape up differently. While in the early stages you could consider your innovation to be like a start up trying to define its business model, as you reach the critical mass your innovation compares more to an established organization trying to serve its customers with consistent and repeatable results.
What does this mean for technology?
Each of the phases of the adoption cycle can be mapped to specific stages of technology maturity, if the innovation happens to be tech related.
For the innovator stage, you are still tinkering with the technology; the technology is still emerging and it’s more about the cool factor “look what I can do” than anything else. At that stage, it’s typically quite rare and expensive.
At the early majority stage, the technology is starting to be used by a few more people: many people are trying things out and different versions of the technology are being developed. What typically happens is that it will eventually converge towards a dominant design, the one that is considered “mainstream” — best practices and guidelines will revolve around this version of the technology.
By the time the technology reaches the early and late majority, you have a dominant design and the technology is pretty mature. The technology can be learned by others, making it easier to replicate and scale (think back to our established organization example).
Aha moment!
What I find fascinating about looking at the adoption of innovation through these different lenses is that is maps perfectly with the innovation principle in the diagram below.
*Note this is nowhere in innovation theory, just a personal “aha” moment.*
When we think about the “innovators” on the adoption curve, we are really focused on the technology side of the Innovation diagram above: if it is feasible, the innovators will be interested.
As you shift to the early adopters, you now start to see what different use cases and applications are coming up. What you are really seeing is the desirability aspect of your technology.
Finally, once you’ve figured out what needs you can solve for people, you can think about the adoption of your technology or innovation by the geenral public. For anyone building a business, this is when the viability of your innovation finally pays off.
