The two figures above reflect frameworks that are widely used within the technology industry to grapple with the treacherous nature of high-tech product development.

Figure 1 is the 2017 Hype Cycle, which is published by Gartner, a large international research company that helps CIOs and other IT professionals understand and evaluate emerging technologies.

The graphic above reflects three different types of innovation “outcomes”:

  1. Initiation of an innovation adoption process that results in an organization making a decision to adopt an innovation. See Post 015
  2. Implementation of the adoption decision, which entails planning, change management, and redefining/restructuring and clarifying the innovation in the field so that it delivers its

glasses_diffusionAre rapidly adopted innovations more valuable and important than innovations that take a long time to take hold? Not necessarily.

Post 011 is part of LE’s foundational series on diffusion theory.  Here’s the key point:  Speed of adoption is not a reliable guide for an innovation’s importance. In fact, competitive advantage is much more likely to lie among slower ideas where innovators focus on several key factors to accelerate the rate of adoption.

It is difficult to accept an insight this counterintuitive. Thus, we need an illustration.
Continue Reading Fast versus Slow Innovations (011)