Mastering The Hype Cycle

The graphic above was originally drafted to be an end-piece for the book – a ‘photocopy and keep’ aid to help people remember the realities of the Hype Cycle’s twists and turns as they wrestle with project situations and perhaps need to regain their perspective.
For both Jackie and I, this was our first book and [...]

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A slightly ominous posting today (Friday 13th)
Last week I passed by a sad sight in Hounslow, London UK  that I just had to photograph and share. If you have read chapter one of the book you will know the case.

When you are deciding what to cut from your portfolio in response to the recession, beware the strategic consequences of of ‘giving [...]

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Most people use the hype cycle to compare and contrast the developmental stages of multiple technologies or innovations at a fixed point in time. These help our clients make appropriate portfolio trade-off,  and innovation adoption timing decisions. All of the current 50+ Gartner published hype cycles are like this and they focus on different domains. [...]

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As we apply Jackie’s original Hype Cycle more and more we continue to discover important extensions and additional observations of its behaviour.  One recent example is the Industries Horsetail.  This simply observes that during the first half of the cycle the path of expectations is fairly consistent across all industries. However in the second half [...]

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We have noticed some examples of multi-path variations of hype cycle drawing. Usually these show what we refer to as ‘high flyer’ and ‘low lander’ paths on the same page – categorising players or technologies into several segments.  The excitement around Web 2.0 has caused a few people to look at things this way.
For example this [...]

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In the 1920s, Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev described cycles of repeating boom and bust in the global economy, each lasting 50-60 years. Other economists have developed the Kontratiev wave theory in more detail, including Carlotta Perez in her book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”. Perez ties the economic [...]

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In a recent response to a posting on this blog, Whit Andrews points out that the shape of the hype cycle is a wave, not a cycle, in that it doesn’t have a loop backward like a true cycle would. This is very true – it’s not typically the technologies themselves that loop around and around. They progress [...]

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One of the questions we regularly get asked about the Hype Cycle is whether things can sometimes fall off or die in the trough of disillusionment. The answer is yes. It is not very common but it does happen. Indeed for Gartner published hype cycles we even have a chart symbol denoting things we predict [...]

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