Technology Adoption Done Different
How does adopting an openly available new technology give you an edge?
That is a conundrum I find myself pondering a lot. If it’s openly available, ultimately everyone else can adopt it too. The most one can hope for is to be doing it sufficiently before others so as to gain some kind of a substantive advantage.
The likelihood of advantage or gain drops the later in the adoption cycle you are. We need look no further than the classic text, “Crossing The Chasm”.
If you’re in the majority, you’ve already lost much chance of substantive gain. The bulk of it has been taken off the table, and there’s just fighting over the scraps with a large crowd. It’s the folks on the left who make gains, banking benefit as the curve rises steeply. Here’s the thing though: those early folks will have suffered much pain and cost in exploring and attempting application. Many of them will have fallen by the wayside.
The economics are a combination of Cost of Delay and Black Swan:
- Most in the early part of the cycle place the wrong bet and potentially incur painful losses.
- A few in the early cycle get the bet right and reap reward.
- The rest suffer lost opportunity proportional to the amount of time ticked by but also incur costs exploiting a vanishing advantage.
Of particular interest here is the last group. They are the majority, their competitors are typically in the same boat with very little chance of making hay. The claim each would make is that they must keep up with their competitors and yet none of them can reap any real advantage, it’s all gone.
Actually, it’s not all gone:
- Black Swan economics are such that it’s possible for one of these late comers to do something highly original but given their propensity for avoiding risk (hence late adoption) it’s unlikely they’d be sufficiently entrepreneurial to catch then exploit such an opportunity.
- Alternatively, it becomes a potential marginal gain (cost efficiency or minor uplift), and is it worth having given the cost of adoption, huge upheaval in roadmaps, re-skilling etc? I think the evidence says no or at least executives don’t buy it because they resist incurring these costs preferring sugar in the form of shipping more product. However let’s assume in isolation, the gain is worth having. How might it stand against other options for gain? Would it really be the “lowest hanging fruit”?
If one really wants advantage from new technology, one must be in early taking the attendant risk which apparently flies in the face of what a lot of industry prefers to do. The majority are repeatedly jumping on used-to-be-new technology with expectation of gains more in keeping with the left of the curve, getting disillusioned and disappointed, seeing little return and then doing it all again. Why?
I’d advocate a more pragmatic approach, getting more selective in your technology adoption practice. Put together some solid customer propositions backed by some real-world data with figures biased to a level of pessimism in regard to expected gains. If, in that light you still wanted to do it, fair enough.
Okay, let’s step it up a level now: If you really wanted the big gains, rather than being an adopter of new technology (even one at the left of the curve), wouldn’t you rather be the builder of that earth-shattering technology?
To do that means focusing on innovation. Not the evolutionary, slightly sharper knife type stuff no, something more in keeping with this:
Or this:
Delivering such a thing takes a long-term mindset, a level of risk and cost but with the potential for huge upside in keeping with Black Swan economics.
Few companies seem to have appetite for this but I can’t see how the claims of big benefit from the more common technology adoption practice stand up. How reliable could you ever be in getting to the left of the adoption curve? And are you honestly prepared to take the risks?
Remember that the big technology inventions come out of a series of slightly, sometimes wildly, wandering steps. It’s very easy to see the final product and be intimidated to the point of not trying it for ourselves but little exploratory steps (dare I say sprints?) are all it takes.
Okay, so you like the economic potential but you don’t want to take a Hail Mary bet. What do you do? Deliver features but ring fence an amount of your resource for experiments. Choose experiments to fit with the resource that you have available but could deliver a significant learning or new piece of knowledge. Don’t get myopically focused on delivering little bits of technology as that’s not got nearly the leverage of gaining in knowledge, understanding problems and solution options. Bezos says it best:
“It is our job, if we want to be innovative and pioneering, to make mistakes and as the company has gotten big — we have $100 billion-plus in annual sales, 250,000-plus people — the size of your mistakes needs to grow along with that,”
