Which End Of The Innovation To Look At?

Tim Kastelle, An Innovation Paradox « Innovation Leadership Network

David Lazer included a really interesting demo in one of his talks at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. He was in a session talking about using the internet as a research resource, and there were about 100 people in the room. Lazer asked how many people there were under 30 years old – about 40% of the people raised their hands. Then he asked how many of those people had a landline – and not one of them did. He repeated the exercise with people over 45, and about 2/3 of us still have a landline.

The point that he was making is that a lot of the people making pronouncements about the internet are over 45 – and our experiences of the internet and technology is likely to be very different from those of the majority of people using the net these days.

Or perhaps almost all of us are startled by very very fast technological advance, or in this case, technological obsolescence. It’s common to follow the arc of new adoption — how many people are buying iPads, for example — but tracking what is being left behind is much, much harder.

Lazer’s presentation trap is a good one because the ‘other end’ impacts of a transition to cell phones are discrete: younger folks simply drop landlines. (Note: I am in my 50’s, and have no landline, so it’s not just the under 30’s cadre.)

But other innovations — adoption of Tumblr-style blogging, or streaming social applications in the business context — don’t have such a clean yin-yang duality to them. It’s messier. And, as a result, Kastelle’s point is made much harder: it’s not clear exactly how these innovations are being used, because what people are leaving behind isn’t as clear as the landlines dropped following cell phone adoption. The groups aren’t discrete.