Business Talk: The Innovation Cycle

“It takes time!”

How many times have you heard that?

If you have a new business, it will take a minimum of 6 months to get some traction. Be patient! It might take, even more, depending on how complex your solution can be. Moreover, if there is a market for it.

If you are introducing innovation, fasten your seatbelt and get comfortable, it will take it more, much more time than you expected!

The infographic above represents what I think is an actual innovation cycle:

- Innovation: a product or service (we will call solution) is introduced to fix an existing problem in any given market in any given industry;

- Rejection: the solution clearly will not be precisely how the market wants so that the market will reject, but this process will provide feedback that will tailor its potential success;

- Adoption: after the changes, the solution starts to be adopted. More adjustments will come and either the innovation will die or will gain market traction;

- Duplication (Copy): if successful, someone else will copy. It will take as the foundation and create a very similar product;

- Commoditization: once the innovation is vastly copied and reach the masses, the value of the solution decreases the pricing, dramatically!

- Consolidation: now, the different market players will look for expansion, and there is when the inorganic development happens. The solution will consolidate.

- Reinvention: after some time, the solution will not resolve the original problem anymore, new markets, new generations and maybe new technologies, will create different challenges and the solution will be reinvented, restarting the cycle.

Electric cars challenging establish automakers

Tesla was not the one that introduced the first electric car but was the one that chooses to manufacture exclusively electric vehicles, so in this case, we can call the Reinvention. Then, everybody was Rejecting, asking questions about reliability, the battery questions regarding safety and autonomy. The rest now is history. What happens next? Duplication: it's happening already. Let's see what's next. 

Ride Sharing challenging Cab Industry

Uber introduced innovation to challenge the cab industry. How many cities, countries and so on rejected the model? The comfort zone was shaken. After they started the adoption, Lyft came - as well as many other systems, on a small scale - duplicated the model, and both will hit IPO this year. 

Social Network

MySpaces tried to do sort of what Facebook did, they failed. Facebook didn't, and again, the rest is history. Twitter and Instagram followed the same path, as well as LinkedIn. They have created different solutions over the same foundation. Also, then, SnapChat came to challenge the "established" social media, with a new model. 

E-commerce challenging Retail

Amazon created a convenient model for e-commerce innovating the shopping experience and so on. You know the rest, Amazon is winning, big time and retailers are losing, big time too!

In the other side, we have some companies with revenue decline or some that even didn't recognize innovation coming. Here we have Kodak, IBM, GE, and many others.

Innovation takes time. 

Only the businesses that can survive this cycle and add exponential adoption will make it happen, disrupt the market/industry and then one day; they certainly will need to reinvent themselves.

So, What do you think? Do you agree with this? 

What other examples come to your minds?

If you like, please share it!

Thank you, and let's keep pushing!