How much is an innovative product or technology?
Innovations pose specific challenges in implementing the market, the greater the greater the degree of innovation of product or technology in question. The question then is how to measure the degree of innovation of a product or technology to significantly impact your marketing strategy? The answer used to adjust the strategies and business techniques.
Traditionally, innovation has been associated with the idea of discontinuity. A product is more innovative break with the more traditional ways of meeting a need and benefits more differences, but probably require a change of behavior changes on users and the market.
With this approach, innovation is measured on a scale of degree of discontinuity, which is an end product innovations that represent continuous (usually extensions of existing products do not require change of use is compatible with existing infrastructure, provide incremental profits) and the opposite end to the products they represent discontinuous innovation (radically new ways of doing things, require changes in behavior, is incompatible with the infrastructure and the existing value chain and provide substantial benefits).
This view of the matter was complemented by the work of Clayton Christensen, who in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” argued that most innovations belong to the category he calls for support (sustaining innovations) to offer innovations market products under the best parameters to use. For example, a new processor technology that allows the manufacture of PCs faster. The sustaining innovations are designed to satisfy the most demanding customers in the market and are usually made by leading manufacturers in their continuing quest for more market share and profitability. Among the innovations to support a broad spectrum ranging from the incremental to the most radical.
In contrast to most of these innovations, Christensen defines disruptive innovations (disruptive innovations) as those that offer products to market paradoxically “worst” as the parameters to use (speed, etc.). And therefore can not be sold to the most demanding customers, but on the contrary provide a different value proposition. Usually these disruptive products are easier to use, reliable and cheap products on the market today, so you can capture the interest of new consumer segments, and in many cases, long-term shift to traditional products. Examples of disruptive innovations include the PC versus the minicomputer or IP telephony compared to the conventional. A disruptive innovation imposes real challenges in terms of marketing, both for the innovative supplier that tries to take the market as for incumbent service providers that arise from it or decide to defend themselves.
However, from a marketing point of view of the most important innovation is to be adopted by their target market, and these ways “one-dimensional” measuring innovation lose sight of one very important factor: the separation between the benefits of adopting innovation and the associated costs. Many innovative products that have failed in the market because they have been focused on providing dramatic benefits to customers, without dealing with counter or minimize costs (not only economic but psychological) that its adoption meant for users.
Consequently, many approaches to marketing reflects this duality of technology-loss benefits:
- Geoffrey Moore in his book “Inside the Tornado”, presents a model in which the discontinuity that characterizes an innovative product has two dimensions: application breakthrough (the benefits) and shock paradigm (the impact on user behavior, infrastructure , etc..) acting as the accelerator and the brake to the adoption of innovation.
- In his article “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers” John Gourville presents a model where consumers value an innovation in terms of what they earn and what they lose in comparison to products currently used. Gourville call these variables degree of change of product and degree of behavioral change and together define a plane that includes products that require a massive change in behavior without providing clear benefits (which he calls sure failures, e.g., the Dvorak keyboard) that provide benefits to other revolutionaries without requiring significant changes (smash hits, e.g., Google).
Ultimately any innovative company that is sure to both sides that define innovation from the viewpoint of the customers is the risk of committing a fatal error.
Related posts: