Surfing the hype cycle of a major innovation is hard work and risky if attempted alone. All leadership can get lonely and this state can be disorientating. To avoid dizziness at the peak of inflated expectations or self destructive behavior in the trough of disillusionment you may need a helping hand. A personal mentor – formal or informal – is a sensible precaution for any hype cycle rider. Pick someone of wisdom and detachment from the situation. Pick someone who has seen many waves and many riders come and go before. Pick someone you trust to be open with and who will help you read both the state the wave and your performance with honesty and directness.

Reminding yourself of these rules should help you maintain a sense of perspective and avoid the mental straight jacket we all tend to fall into when following innovation projects, particularly those that will occupy us for several years.

This is the last in a series of 11

For an overview of ‘Rules for Riders’ see previous post

A great deal of research work goes into these important annual documents and the chart itself is  information rich, but without all the supporting pages it is very easily misinterpreted.  You may have noticed we do not post these charts within our own GBN public blogs.

Thanks for your understanding.

“Congratulations on an excellent book! I use the Gartner hype cycle for a number of my lectures and presentations with respect to stem cells, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine – All are emerging technologies and all are moving nicely along the hype cycle!”

If you’re running a course that uses Mastering the Hype Cycle as a text, we’d love to hear how you are incorporating it and how it’s working out.

Just sometimes the wave will breakdown and there is no way to make it work for you. If it looks like this innovation really just won’t resolve its teething troubles, take the decision, fail fast and learn. Don’t let the wave take you down and turn you over. Sometimes, when a big wave breaks a blame culture arises and individuals become casualties. It is safer for you to choose how to dive off cleanly and save your neck for another. Your practice and experience and a few key indicators will tell you if the wave is a dud – listen to your inner voice if things don’t feel right.  Don’t wait for the fall and make a big ugly splash. You could get career maimed by the board crashing down on your head apportioning blame.

For an overview of ‘Rules for Riders’ see previous post

Enjoy

• Microholographic storage
• Trade show text message content tagging
• Fashion industry surgical masks
• Space based solar power
• Non-food based biofuels
• Augmented reality advertising
• Africa
• Bovine audio players
• Smartphone malware
• Taiwanese Submarines
• VOIP telephony speed dating
• Waterproof OLED
• Fennec – ‘the firefox for phones’
• Eco-friendly clothing
• Aboriginal fusion cuisine

With that in mind I have been playing with public data about the Google Chrome browser to see if it helps evidence a hype cycle curve for that piece of software.  I used Google Trends (search volume) as an indicator of social excitement and browser share as an indicator of market penetration and real progress. It seems to work fairly well.  Remember – the Y axis of the cycle is ‘Expectations’ – there is no perfect measure for that so we must look for proxies and markers to build evidence.  The Hype Cycle is, in the end, mostly a qualitative management tool for expert judgement.

However – here is the indicator curve I plotted from the data.

So what can we learn from the green line that combines the two factors?  Chrome appears to have had a short sharp rise to the peak of inflated expectations – and a quick fall.  We might expect that, because it’s only an incremental innovation (another browser) not a breakthrough, but Google is a major and closely followed company.  Chrome didn’t spend long in the trough of disillusionment – barely 3 months. However it seems to be following a long slow crawl out of there – up a shallow slope of enlightenment.

I’ll try to revisit this in few months time, to see what happens next.

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.

Well – even Email was hyped once. As this Honeywell advert from 1977 demonstrates.

‘What the Heck is Electronic Mail’

Thanks to Thomas Noggle – a Gartner Emerging technologies best practices council research specialist in the US -who brought it to my attention.

The face in the picture looks just like the ones who are all using Email today … to type hostile copy and block business cases for corporate exploration of Twitter, Second Life, Blogging, Wikis and the rest. However there is a difference 20 years on from this ad…  today’s CEO knows tech adoption timing can be a matter of significant competitive difference. Those who sneer and obstruct without careful research and analysis will be remembered.

The hype cycle is a fundamental phenomenon – based in human psychological responses to the new and novel. It forms from the interaction between two forces moving at different speeds, neither of which can be avoided if progress is to be made. It can’t be stopped – though it can be moderated.  If you are involved in buying and applying technology innovations  – your management actions should be designed to make sure the traps of the cycle are avoided and that the worst effects of its highs and lows are moderated.  We have spent many years working on those aspects and that’s why we wrote our book about mastering them.

Here’s our response to Sarah (posted on TechCrunch):

I like your thought provoking viewpoint Sarah. However the Hype Cycle is really an inevitability when any substantial technology based innovation is introduced to a market. It can’t be completely stopped because its existence arises from a fundamental mismatch between the speed of social excitement and the slower pace of engineering progress & market penetration. We explain this in our book about the Hype Cycle.

We believe its effect can be dampened by thoughtful management and mastering it includes learning how to use it to your advantage. It is very important to note that a certain amount of hype can help overcome corporate adoption inertia – so hype is not all bad.

The rise of web based social media is sometimes having an amplifying and sharpening effect on the shape of the curve – I think you are seeing that. This is especially true when the situation is self referential i.e. social media hype about new forms of social media. We probably all have a lot to learn in our use of blogging, twittering and the like – as our societies explore and mature into understanding cultural best practices for these media.

One of the many indicators that the peak of hype has been passed, is when the tenor of media articles about the technology innovation starts to turn sour.  Sometimes that is centered on the lead player in the emerging market for that innovation – which of course requires the analyst to think carefully about whether it is just that company or the generic innovation as a whole which is losing its initial lustre.

With that in mind, here’s an excellent reference example headline that caught my attention yesterday: ” ‘Twitter Sucks!’ The Backlash Begins”

In this article, the New York Observer journalist cites a number of major news media articles about Twitter that have a negative tone – from The Telegraph to CNN. She has even found a Twitter Backlash blog.

Remember the innovation is microblogging (and there are competitors) – so let’s forget the company name for a moment.  This technology innovation example is particularly interesting because the technology is of direct relevance to journalists and media people in their own jobs. So naturally they will discuss it more and the situation is unusually amplified. As they compete for audience attention we will tend to see more extreme hyperbole and backlash. That helps make this innovation a particularly clear reference example, as it passes through the early stages of the Hype Cycle.

We can also see how the web itself is improving the tools to help innovation managers and analysts track technology zeitgeist. I was prompted to read the article becuase I have a daily Google Alert for any mention of the Hype Cycle.  The journalist can quickly follow a hunch (that there is a growing backlash) and find a number of examples to fill her article. She points to a spike in the Google Trends graph for the term ‘Twitter Backlash’ . The mood is encapsulated in the special purpose vehicle of a dedicated public blog. I doubt that blog existed two years ago and I doubt it will be active two years from now – but it will probably be captured for the historical record by systems such as the Internet Archive WayBack machine.

All off this evidence helps form a ‘digital contrail’ for the flight path of the technology – making it far easier to track than when Jackie first described the Hype Cycle in 1995.  Which means that thhe productivity of hype cycle trackers should be improving and you should be able to watch more things with higher frequency for your company.

So what are you waiting for?  Update your own company hype cycle chart of key technologies that matter to your business – right now!

* Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycles – which will include our updated position for microblogging, will be published late Summer.