Mastering The Hype Cycle

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 bubbles [...]

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Recently we have noticed several blogs raise the question of whether there could be an Obama hype cycle. For example Miki Szikszai says ‘I hope his advisers are telling him about the Gartner hype cycle’ and Neville Hobson asks ‘Hmm, I wonder what the Gartner hype cycle would look like if people’s high expectations of [...]

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The hype cycle is a graphical representation of the phenomenon of hype, disillusionment and eventual maturity. Others have observed the same sequence according to their own creative talents – in particular the first part of the cycle – the excitement and the subsequent crash:
• Top of the list is the wonderful music rendition and video [...]

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As well as some of the fine examples of hype cycles from various authors on a wide variety of topics that we’ve  blogged about here, we’ve also seen some interesting comparisons of the shape of the hype curve with some seemingly unrelated but curvy phenomena.  We’re not convinced that most of these are anything more than a coincidence, but we admire the open-minded inquisitiveness [...]

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Hype Cycles arise when a new idea, concept, technology or innovation arises and is introduced to a social group – most commonly for our purpose some sort of marketplace.  They are usually single cycles and then they stop. But sometimes long repeated waves – like economic cycles – can look the same for a while, [...]

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At a recent IBM-organized panel on collective intelligence, the moderator asked whether ideas such as crowdsourcing and peer production were just a fad. As she asked the question, she observed that she was having a hard time coming up with examples of technology fads, as most ended up having some degree of staying power in the [...]

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