🟢 Timing technology push and market pull for incubation programs
One of the most requested frameworks I often have from corporate customers is how Gartner's hype and innovation diffusion work together. To my knowledge, this is weirdly never discussed. So despite this summer's heat waves here goes...
Discussing innovation frameworks is always walking a tight rope. It's about remembering what the model should help you with while not getting too enamored with it that you start trusting it too much. Models and frameworks are crutches. They provide utility, but you should never forget what the utility is and not try to push them beyond that.
Now that I got this out of the way, let's discuss two frameworks (well, three, really), how they combine, and the utility of understanding this.
Quick disclaimer: I'm not going to explain in detail each framework, as I believe you should have some basic knowledge of them already (if not, links are provided).
Roger and Moore's diffusion of innovation
One of the oldest innovation frameworks is probably Everett Roger's diffusion of innovation back in 1962, which categorized the semantics of early adopters, laggards, etc. This framework also was the first theorization of how when an innovation has been adopted up to a point, it reaches critical mass and becomes self-sustained, eventually spreading to everyone.
And this is how Roger described an innovation going from zero to full market penetration in an S-wave:
The notion of a "chasm" was much later introduced (in 2014!) by the brilliant Geoffrey Moore in his seminal Crossing The Chasm. Moore explained that for innovation to go from the early adopters to the early majority, there is a critical non-continuity as these two adjacent demographics think, value, and buy an innovation with entirely different criteria and mindsets (this is true by the way, both for B2B and B2C). Everett S-wave is not continuous, there's a chasm right at the critical step of an innovation possibly going mainstream.
As you presented above, this framework is largely a solid take on how Market Pull happens for innovation from the tiniest part of the market to eventually everyone.
