The Wall Street Journal has a good article, “How to Be a Smart Innovator“.
In this Q&A, Nicholas Carr talks about “bridging technologies”. An excerpt:
For a lot of companies, the people who are in charge of innovation, whether it’s the R&D folks or product developers or entrepreneurs in small companies, are the people who are the most passionate about the particular new technologies. They tend to be the early adopters, and that can give them a distorted view of the market. Because most normal people are actually quite conservative: They’ll adopt a new technology, but they tend to do it quite slowly. That opens up a big opportunity for companies that are smart in figuring out how to help normal, everyday customers create a bridge between an old, established technology or way of doing things and a new one.
New technologies tend to be difficult to use. They tend to be buggy and not work perfectly. They tend to be expensive. All of those things mean that they tend to be limited to a small, early-adopter customer base for quite a long time. If you can figure out a way to move with the market toward the new technology, I think you can do a lot better than jumping ahead.
Back in the dot-com era in the late 1990s, you had all sorts of new-media companies being organized to try to deliver video online. And almost all of them went bust for a very simple reason: Very few U.S. consumers actually had broadband access. The companies were way out ahead of the market in innovation. Even today, fewer than half of American households have broadband Internet access.
In contrast, you have a company like Netflix that was able to bridge between the new technology — the Internet — and the old technology, which is the delivery of video in physical form, by using the U.S. mail to deliver DVDs, yet having a very sophisticated ordering system online that didn’t require broadband access to use.
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Good point. Sometimes we fail to recognise the risks associated with developing new technologies and under-estimate not only the uptake, but also the time and cost to bring it to market. ‘Keep It Simple’ is a good strategy to use, but still recognising that you always need to remain at least one step ahead of the competition. Get the products out fast and get them working for you by bringing quick returns which can help fund further research and development activities. As well as that, getting a new tech. out in a basic format can pay dividends later, because you can learn vast amounts as you build up your experience over time.
That’s Smart Innovation!