Innovation Adoption Timing Can Help Optimise Value Derived

Companies and nations rely on innovation to improve productivity and fuel economic growth, but they don’t necessarily have to excel at originating innovation to be competitive – they have to be able to apply innovation successfully, according to Gartner.

Gartner examines the importance of adopting the right technology at the right time in the newly released book ‘Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time’, published by Harvard Business School Press.

“To make a good decision about when to adopt an innovation, you need to balance three variables: how potentially valuable the innovation is to you, how mature the innovation currently is, and how good your organisation is at tolerating and managing risk,” said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow, and co-author of the book.

“The goal of being selectively aggressive in adopting innovations is a simple one, but one deceptively difficult to achieve in practice,” Fenn said. “The constant barrage of positive and negative hype, the peaks and troughs of hype cycles for every innovation pressure organisations to respond unwisely by adopting too early, giving up too soon, adopting too late, or hanging on too long. These are the four traps of the hype cycle.”

While it’s important to understand the traps that can snare unwary adopters, it’s equally important to examine the opportunities that arise from the inevitability of the hype cycle. Any time an IT leader can predict major shifts in behaviour, such as the major turning points on the hype cycle, they can take advantage by being ahead of the crowd.

“We see two types of opportunities arising from the hype cycle. The first set of opportunities comes from timing your adoption of each innovation with precision to optimise the amount of value you can derive. If you’re going to invest your organisation’s time and money in an innovation, you want to make sure not only that it’s the right one but that you jump in at the time that gives you the longest lifetime value at an acceptable level of risk,” Fenn said.

“The second type of opportunity lies in harnessing the energy of the hype cycle in the broader marketplace by taking advantage of the needs and actions of other players,” Fenn said. “If you can be smarter than the crowd even some of the time in avoiding the money pits of adopting too early or giving up too soon, and the lost opportunity costs of adopting too late or hanging on too long, you’ll come out ahead.”

IT organisations should establish a proactive process to formally monitor, evaluate, and select emerging technologies to bring into the organisation for the right purpose at the right time.