Navigating emerging technologies: from hype to adoption
#193 - Oct.2024
Let's face it: it's hard to keep pace with today's technology.
Consider the rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs). ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months. In contrast, Google Translate took almost six years to hit the same milestone, despite launching 18 years ago.
It can be frustrating—just as you start to understand one technology, a new one emerges to replace it. If learning new tech is challenging, finding real applications for your business can be even harder.
How and when to adopt emerging technologies? This is a question that I often receive from people leading innovation within companies. It seems a trivial question but the answer is a bit more complex.
Many factors can define how fast you adopt a technology. To name a few, it depends on how the market is adopting it, your aversion to risks, and how fast you can iterate over experiments.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but here’s a guiding principle: Technology should enable your product’s value proposition, not drive it.
Technology changes. All the time.
I like to refer to it as the combinational nature of technology. We build new things over previous ideas. They are all iterations of inventions from the past.
Anchoring your entire value proposition to a specific technology limits your vision to a snapshot of that technology in time.
There is a better approach. As technology evolves, you can find new and better ways to deliver your promise.
If you’re in e-commerce, your value isn’t just about selling online; it’s about offering a convenient, seamless shopping experience. In customer service, your value isn’t the latest AI—it’s providing a unique customer experience that solves problems.
It might sound the same, but it is not. Your product’s value should adapt to new technologies, not be dependent on any one of them.
Technology-driven value propositions are risky. As other companies adopt the same technology you quickly become a commodity.
Why I'm talking too much about value propositions? Well, I believe this is an important mental model to understand and leverage emerging technologies.
It is an approach based on experimentation and in perspective of the value that your business is offering.
Let's dive in.
A technology radar
The first thing you need to learn is how to track emerging technologies.
I like to see emerging technologies as signals.
They are all around us and in different frequencies. The trick is pointing your radar to these signals.
There are many resources to simplify these signals, like Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle or ThoughtWorks’ Technology Radar.
These tools provide a good starting point, but you should develop skills to capture and understand these signals. You can do this by:
- Researching your industry and technology domain.
- Evaluating where each technology is in its lifecycle.
- Seeking curated content that emphasizes facts over opinions.
- Understanding potential applications across different fields.
Predicting the outcome of emerging technologies is hard. How fast each technology goes from early adoption to mainstream will depend on multiple factors, from market dynamics to human behavior.
All technologies follow a similar pattern.
They first emerge from a discovery or invention. Early adopters start experimenting. These experiments create momentum and a hype of attention. The hype is often followed by disappointment when people realize the reality. Slowly, technologies regain traction, through real-life applications and mainstream adoption kicks off. In the end, they either decline or evolve.
Timing is important when deciding when to adopt a new technology. Read the signals and ensure you are aware of the current stage of each technology. Here is a simple framework that I use that can help with this:
These questions can help you assess the maturity of each technology and help you decide when to adopt it.
Generally, technologies in the "early adopters" phase are great candidates for experimentation. The risks are relatively lower and you can leverage the benefits of early access.
Experimentation
Whether you are a small startup or a big corporation, technology adoption is related to risk management. You are making a bet.
You can reduce the risk by having strong criteria to assess the value and maturity of each technology. You can use the questions above and customize them to the reality of your business.
Once you have done an assessment, the best way to start is by experimenting.
Start small. Focus on small-scale pilots to bring the technology into your business reality. Your focus on these early experiments is not about scaling, but rather understanding how it can fit into your business strategy, user experience, or other technology platforms.
Start with a clear hypothesis of what benefits you think the new technology can offer to your product or service and work backward from there.
Not all experiments need to be real prototypes or working solutions. You can also ideate through concepts and design sessions. Two of my favorite tools:
- Mixing technologies: This dynamic is focused on exploring divergent ideas on how the combinations of multiple technologies can generate exponential value. Select 2 technologies (can be new or a combination of existing and new technologies). Ideate new solutions that can emerge with the application of both technologies. What can you learn from the new concept you created and the combinational power of technologies?
- Time Machine: For a particular business context - let's say, how customers shop on an online site - create three perspectives of the same process by asking: (a) how customers solved this problem in the past; (b) how customers are solving this problem today; (c) how can they solve it in the future. This exercise usually creates insights into how old solutions connect with new ones. Many times human behaviour doesn't change. What it changes is the technology we can now offer to solve a problem. Connecting the past with the future can become a powerful design tool.
The experiments should give you enough information on the technical feasibility, business value & costs, and impacts on the customer experience to decide to fully adopt and scale a technology. This might require iterations and simplification of the technology.
When technologies struggle to demonstrate these benefits through several iterations it is often a sign that is time to move forward.
Now, the question is: how do we make the space in our team or organization to experiment with new technology?
Making the space
To make the space to experiment with new technology you need to think about people, structure, and mechanisms.
Starting with people: think about your team skills. Developing skills in a technology that is new to the market is hard. Instead, focus on soft skills, especially promoting a culture based on curiosity, simplification, and embracing failure as a way of learning.
I've seen many structures in companies adopting new technology. Most teams opt for creating an R&D division fully dedicated to exploration work. This creates focus and a dedicated capacity to test new technology. However, it is also a double-edge sword: R&D teams can quickly become a ‘secret lab’ disconnected from real customer needs. Aim for the best of both worlds: focus and customer-centric.
For smaller companies that can not afford to create a new team, you can separate part of your team's development capacity for discovery work. This can be in the form of sprints - in the case of agile development - or quick 1-week design sprints to test assumptions.
In any case, what you are looking for is to keep a recurrent work of exploration on how technology can improve the delivery of value to your customers. The level of investment will vary from company to company. To get an idea, companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Google, invest an average of 15% of their revenue in R&D. Simple tip: benchmark your industry to set an initial estimate of this investment.
Finally, mechanisms are great ways to keep track of progress and promote accountability across teams. Ensure you have mechanisms to track new technologies, ensure you work with a clear hypothesis, and how experiments are helping you confirm or deny your hypothesis. Document and socialize your learnings of new technologies across teams and organizations. This is a simple and effective way to invite others to explore with you.
Technology will continue to evolve.
The tools and technologies will change, but your core values and approach as a business shouldn’t.
Experiment and iterate. You might find the next technology that will take your business to the next level.
¡Saludos!
