The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

In The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It?, Stanford’s G. Pascal Zachary writes:

Whether humans will embrace or resist an innovation is the billion-dollar question facing designers of novel products and services. Why do people adapt to some new technologies and not to others? Fortunes are made and lost on the answer.

Novelty is one thing — the dustbin of history is replete with the detritus of great ideas that never went anywhere, principly because:

Great innovations have foundered over human stubbornness. […] Resistance to technology is an omnipresent risk for every innovator.

Seems like an awful lot of trouble, overcoming cultural inertia, ground into human over decades or centuries, creating predilections towards established patterns. Why go to all the trouble? Easy:

Killer apps are sought-after innovations because people get addicted to them and make behavioral changes that might otherwise be unthinkable. […] Dependency drives profits, the ultimate arbiter — for some — of an innovation’s success.

Zachary’s example of such an innovation is the Toyota Prius and the peculiarities of driving it. The context of the Prius’ success in the U.S. can be attributed to a gathering of factors (economic instability, increased fuel costs, nativism in the face of fossil fuel dependency, the constant need for differentiation among those in varying tax brackets and geographies), but the impact on Toyota’s competitors is somewhat clearer:

While people may be fearful of allowing a seductive technology to imperil them [… they may also fear the consequences of not changing their ways.

However, the desire for predictable paths to profitability and new markets (a symptom of corporate management and an outright disease among the bulk of the investor class) limits the limits the average company’s appeptite for long leaps of faith:

FOR technological innovators, the cash register can ring either way. They may achieve a smash-hit breakthrough, or simply make a slight improvement in a technology that humans already feel comfortable with. Most innovators no longer even try to predict human reactions to their creations.

The last point is the most salient. At the Next Engine, we recommend rapid trial and error. “Bet the Farm” answers and the ubiquitous “Big Idea” aren’t typically found at the tail end of a conference room full of people (particularly if the Legal Dept. is attending). Fail early, fail often is the phiolosophy that leads to breakthroughs, if only based on pure statistics.

Tags: innovation