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.

The hype cycle is a great graphic for tracking and setting expectations around innovations, and in particular for educating execs not to get swept away with each new thing. In the context of technology planning, one of its most important functions is to highlight a set of technologies in relation to each other. This is the best way to avoid the trap of rushing in at the peak because “everybody’s doing it” rather than examining what else you could be spending those same resources on prior to making an adoption decision.

Other graphical representations can play a similar role in comparing investment options. One alternate view that we publish with every hype cycle is the priority matrix (see Figure 1 below). This shows benefit on one axis against “time to plateau”, a simple proxy for risk, on the other. This graphic helps focus a planning discussion around the relative risks and benefits of different technology. Note that the benefit is actually quite varied between industries or even individual companies depending on their value proposition, so a major part of using these graphics is to customize them for your own situation. By forcing your team to take a stab at positioning items on a graphic like this, you make hidden assumptions explicit and drive a more meaningful discussion about investment opportunities and risks.

Other graphics was have published that compare technologies include a radar screen-style chart which features timing, and the newly-introduced market clock (clients can see this at Introducing the Gartner IT Market Clock. Also for clients – the 1800 technologies in the My Hype Cycle,2010 toolkit have several fields such as maturity, adoption level and benefit that could be used to create custom graphics from Excel).

What else have you seen or used that fills a similar function in forcing a comparative look at a set of technology candidates?

Figure 1: The 2010 Priority Matrix for Emerging Technologies - this is a different view of the same technologies featured in the 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle (see blog posting 2010 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is Here).

Actor 2.0 (and higher res close up here )

Kick ass robot

Beyond wearable

Minority report prequel

Immersive reality

If you have others that made you say ‘wow’ out loud recently – please let us know.

However, the same poll showed that around half of the organizations were shifting toward shorter term results, and focusing more on cost reduction than on growth. Still, over a quarter were refocusing on growth and longer term activities. This reflects the overall mood that companies feel they need to emphasize cost reductions and short term results in the current economic climate, but also shows that these trends are never “one size fits all”. The importance of making sure that your innovation activities are aligned with your organizational scope and goals - be they cost-cutting, growth, or a balance of each – is still paramount.

It’s always good, then, to see approaches to evangelizing that work, and in particular ones that have staying power. One idea from Google that drew a lot of attention a couple of years back was a skunkworks initiative called “Testing on the Toilet”, or TotT. Google’s Testing Grouplet is a group of volunteer engineers who dedicate their spare time to evangelizing the importance of testing and socializing new approaches and best practices. Their most successful evangelizing initiative was the idea of posting one-page episodes about testing techniques above the urinals and in the stalls of the office bathrooms. Like most truly inspired ideas, this one gives benefits to both sides – the originators of the testing ideas get a broad audience and the readers get something to do during an otherwise mundane activity. A New York Times perspective from one of the grouplet’s founders comments that the idea even led to a new vernacular – “Excuse me, I need to go read about testing” became a euphemism for a visit to the bathroom.

The TotT blog which collects the testing episodes is still active with lively and entertaining descriptions of new testing ideas (who’d have thought?). Each entry offers a pdf download for easy printing and bathroom posting.

TotT is an idea that has value far beyond testing (perhaps we should call it XotT), and one which could be a low-cost evangelizing activity for even the most conservative organizations. And just think of the possibilities once we get electronic paper in those bathrooms (on the door that is, not on the roll).

What other novel ideas have you seen for spreading the word about an innovation or best practice?

In addition to the expected benefits in terms of encouraging new technologies and approaches, he commented that he had also found an unanticipated upside in terms of increasing the level of trust that the business had for IT. He had created a joint sandpit environment with one particular area of the business, to examine relevant new technologies. After working together for a while, the business manager in question requested that a whole set of IT infrastructure that his unit ‘owned’ (because they wanted the flexibility to make their own decisions about acquisition and management) be rolled back into IT.

By demonstrating that IT could be imaginative and flexible at the leading edge of innovation, the entire IT department gained credibility in the eyes of the business.