The Hype Cycle

I came across an article today which talked about why IoT has fallen short of expectations (check it out here). In summary, the key themes were:

• Optimism of prediction
• Niche consumer value
• Privacy concerns
• Inconsistent standards across hardware/software
• Costs and limitations
• Slow promise of the smart home use case

Reading this reminded me of what tends to happen with the adoption of most disruptive (or new) technologies, whether the Internet, AR/VR, AI, blockchain, or cryptocurrency. It is best represented by the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies who shows the rise-fall-rise of how markets tend to adopt innovations.

Below I’ve pasted in a Hype Cycle dedicated to IoT:

The key takeaway from the above charts is time. People always overestimate how quickly the mass market will adopt new innovations. There’s an entire body of work dedicated to explaining the reasons and not for this post. But it’s just not easy to get technology to a cost/performance level that works beyond the early adopters. A lot of things have to go right. And that includes one of the biggest things beyond technology: changing human behaviour.

 

Advertisement

1 Trillion Connected Devices

In a previous post I talked about how SoftBank recently announced that by 2035 1 Trillion devices would be connected. Whether or not that happens is not the point, as it’s about the ambition & not necessarily the result. But for that to happen, what needs to occur?

1. Market adoption by consumers and businesses of new products/services that help them solve most of their important daily problems & challenges;

2. Significant improvement in connectivity, cloud, data analytics & management, AI & other IoT solution & related technologies to help enterprises and the ecosystem handle all the real-time data being generated by the devices at such a significant scale;

3. Digital transformation of established enterprise & government to rapidly adapt to the new paradigm and compete with IoT focussed startups;

4. Deep ecosystem & cluster development with value-chain players working together & aligned in R&D and GTM within specific industry sectors or use cases.

5. Significant lowering of device manufacturing costs to enable business model innovations to drive market adoption, such as subscriptions, service models and so on.

There may be others but this is just a sample of my initial thoughts right now. If you have any others be sure to let me know

The Big 5

This post won’t be about what you might see on an African safari. Instead, today I’m thinking about where we are now, and where we are going in relation to the full potential of five disruptive technologies that get the most attention: AI, IoT, Blockchain, AR/VR, & Big Data.

Each technology is still in their infancy but fast maturing and gathering steam. We saw with cryptocurrencies in 2018 as a key use case for Blockchain which drove significant consumer & business adoption & later, government intervention

As I look ahead, the most interesting thing for me two-fold: (i) the timeframe(s) for the intersection of these technologies from a market adoption and technology maturity perspective, and (ii) the subsequent implications for established firms, and opportunities for new ones. If we think back to the late 2000s (over a decade since consumer internet introduction), it wasn’t until the launch of next generation mobile phones (via smartphones, tablets) that dramatically accelerated internet adoption driven largely by e-commerce. This opened up entirely new ecosystems (Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon) whilst destroying others (Nokia, Motorola, Sears) in the process. For B2B/C, this enabled a new lawyer of applications & services for consumers & businesses alike, such as local discovery (e.g. restaurants), on-demand services (e.g. taxis, TV), & mobile (e.g. Amazon, eBay, banking). All designed to make life easier & better.

In 2018, such continued technology disruption – driven by the intersection of mobility & the internet – is only getting started (think retail, financial services, real estate etc). If we layer on top one or more the Big 5 technologies, it will be like pouring kerosene over an already burning fire. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.