Innovation Series: Part 3 – Hard and Soft Trends

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In Part 3 of this series, I’d like to cover the world outside of your company. In order to be an innovative company, you must be able to constantly monitor the trends affecting your customers, your competitors, your supply chain, your economic environment, in essence, your whole ecosystem.

Dan Burrus likes to refer to trends as hard trends and soft trends. Hard trends are those trends that you know are going to happen. Moore’s law is a hard trend. Apple releasing iOS10 this year and iOS11 next year are hard trends. “Uberization” and “Amazonification” are both hard trends (please forgive my crude turn of a proper noun into a verb). A soft trend is something that appears to be a trend, is statistically indicative of a trend, but it might change.

I also like to refer to this concept in a sliding scale with zero being a very soft trend and 10 being a solid-as-the-earth hard trend.

Sliding Scale of Trend Hardness

Examples of trends that that are a 10; Somewhere it will rain tomorrow, millions of people will use their mobile devices, billions of people will drink some water.

Examples of trends that are very soft (0 or 1); Specific taxes implications from the new 2017 session (unknown), healthcare (unknown), world trade (unknown). These trends will harden over the coming months as decisions in Washington become law.

The increased use of mobile at home and work is a hard trend. Apple vs Android is more of a soft trend, but within that trend distinction, it is a hard trend that people who like to spend money on apps favor Apple and people who despise paying for apps tend to favor Android.

The reason you need to get good at ranking trends is you want to bet on the harder trends because they are low risk, and you want to monitor the soft trends until they become harder trends.

Cuts both ways

Trend monitoring is a very strong technique and can be a sharp blade to help direct resources where the risk/reward ratio is the most favorable. But it cuts both ways. If you fail to stay close to trends, you risk falling behind or becoming irrelevant. Look at the taxi cab companies that were caught unaware when Uber arrived and traditional retail brick and mortar businesses that are scrambling in the face of Amazon.

Uber – the perfect storm of hard trends

Uber caught the right hard trends. Before the iPhone, the GPS market was maturing. It had grown from lat/lon position reporting to black and white map based to color. GPS technology advancement was a pretty hard trend. The trifecta of computing power, network bandwidth and storage were already following Moore’s law. Personal Digital Assistants were proliferating in parallel with standard cell phones. People were not real fond of carrying a PDA and a cell phone and a pager, but that was life before the iPhone. Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo and a number of destination sites were giving the public a taste for the ability to find just about anything in the world as long as you were connected to your desktop. Then the iPhone happened and combined all of these technology hard trends in one place.

In parallel to the technology trends, demographic trends were taking place. Business travel grew to 5 times the early 1980s rate of 200 billion annual air miles to 600 billion annual air miles by 2007, which stayed pretty steady into 2014. That means there a lot of seasoned business travelers who have to get from point a to point b efficiently and with the least amount of stress. In 2009, when Uber launched, unemployment was very high. Suddenly there was a way to make money if you owned a late model car, had a good background and drivers record and owned an iPhone.

Taxi companies were always a hassle. At least they were for me during my years as an IBM road warrior. You have to search the yellow pages (remember!?) or Google/Yahoo/Alta Vista from your desktop machine for a list of cab companies. Ask your co-workers or business sponsor which was the most reliable, then wait for an unknown amount of time to get picked up. Uber combined all of these trends and took a major pain away from getting around in a hassle free manner. Cab companies were caught by surprise. Why didn’t any taxi cab companies come out with an app? The trends were there.

Looking to the future

I’ll leave you with the top 10 Strategic Technology Trends according to Gartner for 2017. They are grouped into 3 categories.

• Intelligence
  • Applied AI & Advanced Machine Learning
  • Intelligent Apps
  • Intelligent Things (Internet of Things)
• Digital
  • Virtual and Augmented Reality
  • Digital Twins (I’m skeptical on this one)
  • Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers
• Mesh
  • Conversational Systems
  • Mesh App and Service Architecture
  • Digital Technology Platforms
  • Adaptive Security Architecture

There are many other trends to follow, the Gartner Top 10 is but an example. Make sure you have an ongoing process built in to your strategic planning to track these trends. I’d be happy to help!

I could write several pages on trends, past and future, but I will save those for future posts.

In Part 4, I’ll talk about techniques, strategies, pitfalls and risk factors to think about when introducing innovation into your ecosystem.

© Mark Travis – All Rights Reserved      http://www.travis-company.com

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