It's Not About Being First... It's About Market Adoption

from the innovation-vs.-invention dept

We've discussed the difference between "invention" (doing something new) and "innovation" (finding a new successful market) before, and it's resulted in some long and occasionally contentious discussions. Fred Wilson put up a post recently where he looked at a series of product "success" stories, and tried to figure out what was the key to success. In each one, he noted that the product enabled people to do stuff in a different way -- but one of the key findings, was that they all had something else in common: being drop dead simple, leading to much greater adoption. As Fred notes:

It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

This is a key point -- and it seems so key that I'm often confused how people can claim that being first is somehow more important -- so important that we should bar those who have that vision and are able to take a product to a market in a much better way. How can anyone claim that it's a better solution when the people with the vision to make a product more useful and more valuable such that the market will actually use it, should be blocked from doing that?

At the same time, we see all the time how people mock the "followers." As you look down Fred's list -- including products like the iPhone, Facebook, the Wii, the FlipCam, Blogger, Pandora and Twitter -- when each started to become popular, there were naysayers who insisted they were nothing special and no different than "x" that came before them. And, in many ways, those people had a point that these offerings weren't necessarily new as products, but the implementation was new. For whatever reason, each of those offerings were easier/better/simpler to understand in a way that made the market more willing to adopt them, such that they all have become more useful and more valuable to those who use them. Yes, there are still those who bitch and moan that they're "no different" and who don't understand the value. I'm sure we'll see some of them in the comments here. Yet, what these people miss out on is the fact that this isn't a race about being first -- and it's not about how useful it is to just you, the naysayer. It's about what makes the wider market sit up, take notice and find the real value.

Filed Under: innovation, market adoption