Assessing Future Markets for New Technologies

In this chapter Day reviews several keys to assessing future markets for new and emerging technologies. This is a key element in managing an emerging technology; no matter how significant an improvement or how amazing the perceived potential of a new technology, without a market for the technology all investment and time spent developing the technology is for naught. Day’s review covers three primary activities in assessing markets for emerging technology: diffusion and adoption, exploration & learning and triangulation for insights. Exploration & learning is described as a process of “probe and learn” where the company uses a trial and error process to explore markets through interaction with perspective customers and development of prototypes and betas and the introduction of these to the perspective customers. Triangulation for insights is the process of learning from lead users, learning about latent needs, and anticipating inflections. Through the process of triangulation, assessing the interaction of these three items, one can direct the development of the product and identify the potential market for the product.

While both of the previous aspects are vitally important to successfully identifying markets the method that caught my attention the most was diffusion and adoption. Perhaps the primary reason that I was intrigued by this was the similarities that this concept has to the concept of “crossing the chasm.” It seems to me that the mistakes mentioned in this section are dominant mistakes that cause new technologies to fail. Of particular interest is the idea that thinking of the model of user adoption can lead to failure as one intuitively expects to make a progression through the ranks of adoptors. As Day mentions this is a common mistake that people make, assuming that this is a progression without considering the different needs and values of each set of users. Often times managers expect that each new group will follow the prior group in adoption of a new technology, when the new group, while they may share similar needs, has different views of the world, which often need to be addressed specifically to provide a viable product. The use of triangulation is an excellent tool to help prevent this mistake.