Mastering The Hype Cycle

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 [...]

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Powerpoint gets a lot of bad press, often for good reason (see for example the NY Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint). But the power of a good graphical representation as a focal point for discussion transcends the medium that delivers it — flip chart, Powerpoint or, as in the very first [...]

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[this post also appears in Mark Raskino's GBN Blog] I was asked recently by Economist correspondent Ludwig Siegele, whether Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ is following the Hype Cycle. This might sound like a contrived conjunction of two abstractions but actually, it is a very good question.  The Long Tail is a new management science idea, [...]

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In a Financial Times online article dated June 2nd, Mr. David Smith – the Chief Investment Director of GAM (part of the Swiss wealth management company Julius Baer) discusses the hedge fund bubble burst of 2008. As part of his analysis he says: The research group Gartner tried to prove the potentially positive outcomes of [...]

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I really owe it all to Miss Mackie, former headmistress of the City of London School for Girls. Once a week she instructed our class of energetic 11-year olds in English literature, keeping us pinned silently to our desks by force of her imposing presence. The book open in front of us was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an [...]

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Every now and then you need to inspire your internal audience and remind them what the power of the microprocessor will make possible. Moore’s law isn’t done with us yet. Here are some links to videos – not all of them brand new – but still likely to help drop jaws and get people talking. [...]

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If you are old enough, or a film fan, you will recall the famous speech by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street where he espouses the idea that ‘greed is good’‘ There is a double edge to using that analogy to support my argument – but here goes!… In a non-tech corporation, the biggest [...]

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I have been reading a fascinating piece of academic work published in 2006 by Olavi Uusital of the Tempere Universtity of Technology in Finland and Kjell Grohaug at the Norwegian School of Business and Administration.  In ‘Expectations and Consequences of International Partnership: The Case of Benecol’ they use the Hype Cycle to describe and measure the fortunes of the company [...]

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A CIO at the recent Sydney Symposium described to me how he had set up a number of activities to drive innovation within his organization, from early stage “sandpits” for experimentation, through “hothouses” for nurturing promising ideas, to later stage “engine rooms” for rolling out new ideas in a disciplined way. In addition to the [...]

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We explain in the book how and why organizations must explore and exploit the hype cycle differently according to their level of technology risk-aggressiveness. Failing to understand the prevailing culture of a company and act within it is a frequent cause of hype cycle induced strategy error. So perhaps you believe you work in a [...]

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