Hype Doesn’t Change the World. Scale Does.
The most-hyped technologies often have a long way to go.
Which technologies will truly disrupt the world in the coming 10 years?
If you casually browse media you might find headlines like this one:
Electric vehicles are badly needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so a battery breakthrough like this one must be important, right?
This piece of news received a lot of attention recently, which makes sense — until you look into it. It turns out that to make it work, Samsung needed to use a layer of silver-carbon composite on the anode. This is very expensive and means that these batteries will have a hard time competing against conventional Lithium-ion chemistries if they are ever produced at scale.
Chances are slim that this technology will ever make it into mass-market vehicles. So why the hype?
Enter the Amara Hype Cycle
“We overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” — Roy Amara
Most innovations go through three phases in the public domain:
1) The Hype “Wow, this is game-changing!”
2) Disappointment: “Well, this didn’t quite match our expectations…”
3) Silence: “What was that all about? Let’s move on.”
It’s only the third phase that truly matters — the long and hard path to reach scale.
Execution to reach scale requires failing, learning, and iterating, with huge amounts of hard work. This is when a proper business model might materialize, which would get the attention of investors. This might also be when things start to fall apart. None of these would merit a press release, let alone headlines in the media.
This process can often last 10–15 years, and it’s now that we slowly begin to understand the true potential of an innovation — or the lack of it.
Consider these questions the next time you see an exciting headline about a new technology: Is it still at the lab or pilot stage? Is it an academic or commercial initiative? Is it a side project at a large corporation, or is it a startup betting its existence on this technology?
Despised, ridiculed, or ignored? Pay close attention.
Think about some of the technologies that have been hyped over the past decade or two: cryptocurrencies, virtual and augmented reality, voice recognition, machine learning… They were all first hyped, then ridiculed — and eventually ignored by most people. It isn’t until now that we are beginning to see a clear path to viability and true impact.
Solar PV is a case in point. After several years of hype and disappointment, it has now come a long way on the path to scale. A few days ago the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that wind and solar power will overtake gas and coal by 2024.
That is truly game-changing. And this is probably just the beginning — solar PV may very well turn out to be the most transformative technology humanity has ever seen. Does this create excitement? The IEA report led to this kind of headlines:
“Renewables will overtake gas and coal globally in 2024, IEA predicts”
Sounds important, yes — but not exactly exciting or engaging. And neither the headline nor the story gets across the transformative nature of this development.
I don’t blame the journalists or the editors. It’s hard to write an engaging story about future predictions and mature technologies. It’s easier to write about exciting prototypes that exist in a lab today, however far they are from reaching scale.
Enter climate and it gets serious
This isn’t about predicting the next cool piece of tech. It’s just as useful when applied to the most serious topic of them all: the climate crisis.
What happens between now and 2030 will have existential implications for generations to come. Emissions need to decline — quickly. Our success to do so will depend not just on technological change — but also the scale at which these technologies are deployed.
There are only a limited number of proven and scaleable low-carbon technologies that we can rely on to deliver worldwide impact within 10 years. All the hyped but unproven technologies are a bonus. If they succeed — great. But we better have something to fall back on if they don’t.
Where would you place these technologies on the hype cycle?
