As Seth Godin points out in a recent blog posting, there is often a long preamble to the trigger that launches an innovation on its path up to the Peak of Inflated Expectation. In Mastering the Hype Cycle, we track the advent of usage-based car insurance offerings (such as Snapshot from Progressive Insurance) back to vehicle tracking discussions in the 1970s. In this case, as in many others, it took decades for technology performance and costs to reach a point where realistic user trials, and eventually products and services, were technologically feasible and economically viable. There are often mini-peaks and troughs along the way – for example, breakthroughs in quantum computing are reported every few years. Designer and researcher Bill Buxton calls this phenomenon the long nose of innovation (a play on the “long tail” of product popularity).
Spotting the trigger of a hype cycle can be a challenging but highly rewarding activity – it’s mostly the domain of the aggressive, Type-A adopters who keep an eye on start-ups, go to VC events, and tour industrial and academic labs regularly. The payoff is first mover advantage, the penalty for getting it wrong is wasted investment and potentially tipping off fast followers about a strategically important bet. But for the growing number of organizations who are adopting a strategy of being selectively aggressive in areas that matter to them, learning to spot the trigger is an important skill to master.