Unhyping the Hype Cycle: Five Secrets to Building an Attention Dashboard for Any Innovation
If we could only predict the next boom in cryptocurrency. Or when gene therapies might show up at your local Walgreens. Or when planes will fly themselves. Timing any of these correctly will make individuals rich and shareholders giddy. Timing them wrong will bankrupt investors and sink promising product launches. The most popular model for understanding technology trends such as these, and cashing in when the time is right, is the Gartner Hype Cycle. If ever there were applications where its usefulness should apply, it would be cryptocurrency, gene therapy, and self-flying planes. Unfortunately, the Gartner Hype Cycle can’t help us understand any of these trends. The only enlightenment it can offer is the simple truism that “hype exists.” Sorry Gartner, but PT Barnum proved that theory 100 years ago.
Let’s see how we can do better.
Introduction
Anyone who has sat through a corporate PowerPoint presentation or Investor Pitch Contest has seen the Gartner Hype Cycle. As testament to Gartner’s excellent marketing, most corporate followers can recite it by heart: After a trigger event, hype grows quickly, peaks, crashes just as quickly, and then slowly reaches a balanced equilibrium. It’s so reasonable and intuitive that most of us rarely…
