Crossing The Chasm

Yesterday I attended a talk by Scott McGregor in Mountain View, CA that I found on Upcoming.org. The talk covered how to market disruptive technologies and shape them into dominant forces in the market.

In the wake of this, I’ve been thinking more and more about technologies versus products. When one looks at the “Crossing the Chasm” chart, we see that innovators are the first line of people on the road to technology inception.

Innovators like technology and they talk a lot. These are the mavens and people-connectors that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book,”The Tipping Point.” These are the people who probably stood in line outside your local Apple Store for an iPhone for 24 hours.

They like everything cutting-edge and annoying the crap out of their friends with all of their gadgets.

So with that said, think about the innovators/fanatics you may know. If you are a start-up or large company with a “product,” bust out your best elevator pitch and think about this. Will your technology/”product” drive people to this kind of fanaticism?

Too many start-ups these days are trying to deploy technologies to the market while falsely calling them products. The problem here is that products are what influence innovators, technologies influence later adopters.

For example, 3M had developed an adhesive that had no uses within the company for years. Finally, on accident, the Post-it note was created by a choir-girl daughter of an employee who was tired of losing her music sheets. If it weren’t for the Post-it product, the adhesive technology may have remained in obscurity until today.

I like to think of it like this. A technology is like quantum mechanics. It is vast and will explain the entire universe to the eyes of the beholder. A product is like Planck’s constant – simple, elegant, and concrete.

The product’s simplicity should be the result of endlessly pinpointing a use for a technology. So that the end result is undeniably useful and applicability seemingly universal, thus making way for further innovation and keeping the cycle going.

It should be a constant thereafter in the quantum equation of that market. More on that later hopefully.