Hype Cycles arise when a new idea, concept, technology or innovation arises and is introduced to a social group – most commonly for our purpose some sort of marketplace. They are usually single cycles and then they stop. But sometimes long repeated waves – like economic cycles – can look the same for a while, particularly to those who are new Hypecyclists. Let me gently suggest, that while those of us old enough can usually separate an ever repeating cycle from a one-time hype wave, younger managers might reasonably get confused the first time through. It’s easy to roll your eyes if you are, like me, in late middle age – but you have to sympathize with those relative youngsters who, despite all their brains and education recently took on monster mortgage payments they are already regretting.
With that in mind, I enjoyed this visual commentary on the real-estate boom/bust cycle, which ‘Realty Bites’ blogger Michael Kupritz kindly points out is NOT a Gartner hype cycle. Nice one Mike.
So while there might be a CDO innovation Hype Cycle, the real-estate market follows a longer term repeat pattern.
Home Price Cycle
5 responses so far ↓
1 Whit Andrews // Sep 30, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Something that I have wrestled with over the years I have been here is that the hype cycle isn’t. It is, in fact, a hype wave (as you hint at in the post here). I’m not calling for a major rethink of the hype cycle itself, or, heaven forfend, its renaming. I am, though, of a mind that perhaps some notions really DO pass through a hype cycle, with new iterations each time. One might be “interactive video,” in which initial iterations might be Qube, or something like it, working through ITV and QuickTime on the Web and then Broadcast.com and now YouTube and tomorrow, I’m not sure. That’s a real CYCLE. What this kind of cycle would look like would be the wave you have here from the real estate industry, but closed into an ordinary loop, to become something elliptical or circular. If we came up a layer of abstraction, we could be more distantly predictive — and make it easier, it seems to me, for those newcomers to see the way the future might end up. (Over, and over, and over…)
2 Mark Raskino // Oct 1, 2008 at 5:24 am
Good point Whit and I know this observation can leave an imperfect rough edge to the tool in many people’s minds. Like – its useful but ‘you missed a bit’.
The Hype Cycle is not a truly closed and endless loop – agreed. Not like the water cycle. However, it is cast from the innovation adopter / buyer point of view and it is an ever repeating pattern of social behavior. Remember the Y axis is ‘expectations’ – the curve is representing people’s response to the technology, not the technology itself. It is not a market penetration curve or a measure of technical maturity. The pipeline of technology innovations is – for the practical scope of this management tool – ‘infinite’ and so it is actually ‘we’ who go round and round the same behaviour cycle.
Mark
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