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.

First , we agree, from Lars Rasmussen’s viewpoint,  the internal project is likely to be following the hype cycle.  Big projects do this because there is a collective social reaction from the  development team and internal management. It is one of  initial enthusiasm followed by the dawning realization of all the complexities and things to be worked through, including intial customer response.

However when looking at Wave from the outside, and the buyer point of view as an innovative product in a market, it is worth us making some additional observations.

1)  The vast majority of technology innovations do make it through the hype cycle

2) Individual products, might not – or might be radically altered as they pass through the trough of disillusionment.

We often use ‘search engines’ to illustrate this point that it is really a technology category that moves through the market hype cycle – rather than an individual product (or vendor).  Back in 1996 Alta Vista and Yahoo were lead players at the peak of inflated expectations for the then newly developing technology of ‘web search engines’. But it was Google that really drove that technology out of the trough, up the slope of enlightenment and onto the plateau of productivity (and profitability). So search engines made it through the full hype cycle (and how!).. but Alta Vista didn’t. Using a more contemporary example, when people mention Twitter – it falls into the technology called ‘microblogging ‘ (along with Yammer, Facebook status updates and others). It’s microblogging that will move through the full market hype cycle.

It’s interesting that so far there isn’t really a strong generic market category name for the technology of which Google Wave is an example. Google’s own initial description for Wave was a bit cumbersome  – a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration.  My analyst colleague Ray Valdes offers the shorter unified real-time collaboration. But this lack of clear naming is not surprising – distinct emerging technology category names often do take a while to form. The earlier stages of the hype cycle are full of market confusion – including terminology.

The underlying ideas within the innovation that people like, find useful, refine, measure, extend and  integrate with other things will most probably reach the plateau. However as some have conjectured – Wave as a distinct product does not necessarily have to survive (please note I am not offering a Gartner prediction here).  Elements of Wave might be swept up and incorporated into other Google offerings – but that might still constitute success for the technology as a category.

When we look at the velocity that innovations are moving through the hype cycle, there is one type of innovation that does seem to move at a much higher speed. These are the innovations that arise from the consumer Web world, in particular those that involve collaboration and social networking. These technologies, as typified by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, seem to launch fully formed and move rapidly from the early adopters to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, often in less than a year. There is still some inevitable disillusionment (see Mark’s posting Classic Hype Cycle Turn Signal – Twitter Backlash Reported) as individuals figure out how to manage a new source of potential information overload and companies scratch their heads about finding the business value. For corporate adoption in particular, it may still take several years for the innovation to move from the Peak to the Plateau of Productivity. But overall, the path is distinctly more rapid than a traditional, multi-decade hype cycle.

The feature that distinguishes these technologies is that they are born not from years of visible, documented laboratory R&D, but from the viral melting pot of the Web. For every Facebook and Twitter, a thousand similar ideas were also launched that didn’t have quite the right set of features, or the right interface, to rise above the crowd. Once the next viral site does emerge, it has already won a Darwinian battle and is ready for broader adoption.

Outside of this class of technology, it seems that in most cases the overall speed through the hype cycle hasn’t necessarily increased. Some of the innovations that will start to hit the Peak this year – such as augmented reality, tablets and touch technologies – have already been in the labs for decades. In particular, technologies that involve fundamental hardware advances, such as a new type of display or networking capability, tend to have a long period of laboratory fermentation.

Going forward, we are likely to see a growing proportion of innovations arising in the consumer world, particularly with the growth of platforms and app stores that encourage and reward a broad set of innovators. It will be important to track these sources as well as traditional labs and vendors. But the hype cycle still seems to be holding up as a pattern that reflects our attitudes to most types of innovation, and accounting for both “fast track” and “long fuse” technologies. Perhaps what is accelerating is not so much the pace of innovation itself, but rather society’s level of ADD, causing us to cycle more rapidly between our peaks of enthusiasm for each next new thing.

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 of course we learned a lot in the process of writing it.  One of the lessons is that not every idea and observation you have really fits the work neatly. So you have wield the scissors occasionally during the drafting process to cut things out.  Sometimes that can hurt a little – when others tell you something really has to go. Our wonderful supporting professional writer Kent Lineback helped us to make the harder decisions. One saving phrase nowadays is “it can always be used in the book blog – it won’t go to waste”.  So here it is.

In future posts – I’ll take you through ‘the rules’ one by one. Stay tuned.

P.S.  Why rules for ‘riders’? Jackie was originally keen to call the book ‘riding the hype cycle’ but our editors convinced us that sounded a bit too passive. They proposed we center it on ‘Mastery’ instead becuase it creates a better sense of control.  I took some convincing at the time – but I am now very sure it was the right decision.

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 up in the trough’

Occasionally we develop a different format of hype cycle view which takes a single innovation and a fixed date time-line. This helps to explore the recent past and possible future evolutionary milestones for an innovation. The good thing about these is that they help to shape your thinking about how the thing will play out, over what time period and the various forces at work.  It is a scenario exploration tool – good for helping to generate future event hypotheses, but those require a lot of additional work before they can be made into predictions.

Here’s a simple illustrative example from some work I did back in 2005

Illustrative example of a single innovation cycle from 2005

And here’s a well populated example of a single innovation cycle plotted by someone outside Gartner -  learning consultant Michael Hanley

Single innovation cycle by an independant consultant (not Gartner Research)

Actually, one of the most famous individual hype cycles published by Gartner was a fixed time-line version on a single innovation. We include Alex Drobik’s E-business hype cycle in the book.

For example this one comes from 10V Partners:

And this one comes from Valleywag:

What’s interesting of course is to look at the pattern of each previous “technological revolution” to see if it sheds any light on the future of our current one (information and technology). Perez points out that the pattern certainly looks familiar so far: an eruption phase with a rapid growth of core technologies, followed by a frenzy phase consisting of an explosive expansion of infrastructure and financial speculation. In every other technological revolution, the frenetic build out of the infrastructure and the financial bubble that accompanied it was followed by financial collapse – again, sounds familiar. The good news is that, if the model holds true, the next phases (synergy and maturity) are where we’ll start to see the real impact of the technologies on business and society. Just as the car led to social constructs such as suburbs and shopping malls, information technology will continue to transform the way we live and work.

And yes, the hype cycle overlays perfectly onto Perez’s charts of bubbles and crashes and eventual maturity. It seems that we reserve our greatest enthusiasm and financial speculation for anything to do with infrastructure – canals, railways, highways or the Internet. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Kondratiev waves span a generation – we need a new set of suckers… I mean speculators, who haven’t seen it all before and are willing to fuel the (seemingly essential) massive, global experimentation of each technological revolution.

However, as Whit also accurately points out, there are sometimes technologies that do seem to cycle between the Peak and the Trough. In past research, we have referred to these as Phoenix technologies, defined as follows:

Phoenix technologies cycle through enthusiasm and disillusionment continually, with an evolved interpretation of the concept on each iteration. Agents are a prime example of a Phoenix technology. Agent technology is embedded in certain product classes (for example, network management and comparison shopping), but there are many other capabilities and interpretations of agent functionality that re-emerge year after year.  (From “Escaping the Hype Cycle: Dead or Alive?”, Gartner research note from 2002)

One of the graphical challenges we have examined is how best to represent these Phoenixes. We have shown them informally as a loop back from the Trough to the Peak, but with a horizontal axis representing “time”, we don’t want our Phoenixes to be time-travelers as well. In fact they are more accurately represented as a recurring sequence of Peaks and Troughs. We talk in the book about the “double peak” hype cycle, where a significant performance improvement, product repackaging (eg suites) or similarly hyped activity launches the innovation up the slope in a dramatic fashion (with an extra mini-hype cycle), as compared to the usual more subtle and easily missed maturation path. (This also relates to the idea of hype cycle as fractal, which we’ll explore another time). In other cases there are multiple Peaks that each end in a significant Trough – Whit cites interactive video, another example is virtual worlds (VRML around 2007, Second Life in 2007), as well as the intelligent agents we used in the original definition.

This pattern brings to mind the feeling of trying to start a gas-powered lawnmower. A sharp tug on the starting cord triggers a surge of energy which rapidly drops away – either to the satisfying chug of a functioning engine, or the frustrating sound of silence. That’s the perennial question with a Phoenix technology – will this round of hype launch the start of real maturity, or is it another false start? We’ll keep analyzing examples of each to try and answer that question a little better each time.