It’s that time of year, with article after article citing the trends that will matter most in 2014. Do a quick Google search and you’ll see what I mean — right now there are over 1.5M total hits for the term “2014 trends” alone:
About 1,540,000 results (0.30 seconds)
As an innovation leader or sponsoring executive, how should we use this information and what effect should it have on our plans? Should we take it as evidence that we are on the right track? Or perhaps we should use it as a trigger for what books we should add to our Kindle or what interesting questions to bring up at the next networking event.
The professional technology researcher and planner, on the other hand, views these kinds of reports very differently — something that is key to making a realistic assessment and creating an accurate response for your organization. What they understand, is that many of these trends that are being reported as “new” and “breakthrough” have actually been in the pipeline a very long time, and in fact have had several runs at commercialization. In fact, the research and analysis company Gartner has built a practice around its “hype curve” methodology which carefully monitors many key product category disruptors to map their progress from the peak of inflated expectations through their actual productive applications.
The 3 Questions You Need to Ask
Let me share three questions that will serve to blow away some of the fog and hype to help you get a more grounded view. To demonstrate how these questions can help you read trend forecasts within your own business, we’ll use them within the context of the driverless vehicles set to hit the road in 2020.
1) What essential elements are missing from the narrative?
The Buck Rogers views from the 1930’s have long promised the idea of us being able to sit back and read the newspaper on the way to work while our personal vehicle whisks us downtown and parks itself with no inputs from the “driver”. While massive steps have been made recently, there are still some very important keys missing from this narrative:
- The hardware, while eye popping, is still insufficient to allow true hands-off travel. Driverless cars will crash, so who gets to decide on what that “crash optimizer” looks like and how it will compute the balance between occupant and pedestrian safety? Before these cars can hit the road, there is immense case law and liability apportionment that needs to happen first.
- The costs are still very high for a well-equipped autonomous car. Consider this: the forward-looking radar alone (the technology that allows full autonomy) is about three times the price of a mid-sized vehicle. Will shrewd use of video and less costly sensors close the gap? Absolutely, but it will take significant time.
2) Is there a true inflection point? And, if so, what is anchoring it?
Every significant change in a market always moves through an inflection point, where the dominant previous method of meeting the need is unseated by the application of the new device or service.
In the case of the driverless vehicle, it is unclear what will anchor the pivot from driven to monitored vehicles. Currently, the path seems to involve the cherry picking of key elements from the subsystems and bringing them to market as features – i.e. self parking, forward collision alarming and mitigation, blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. These all add value, but are features that well-trained drivers can complete just fine on their own.
Given this, the “tipping point” is unclear at best. A fascinating prelude to true driverless vehicles may actually be seen in truck platooning as demonstrated by Volvo. This is interesting in that the human in the front vehicle becomes the “engineer” for the vehicle “train”.
3) What core need or behavior does the new trend answer?
The truly profound breakthroughs are those which take intense human and productive need and allow them to be done in a new way. Take McCormick’s reaper, for example, which was a huge breakthrough for crop and food production. The key to finding truly transformative changes is being ruthlessly honest on what the specific user story is for the product.
Short of a technical tour de force, the core need for driverless vehicles remains somewhat murky. The dominant themes of driverless vehicles are convenience, safety, fuel conservation and higher traffic densities. But the real question that needs to be asked, is in the complex world of the consumer’s choice menu, where will this rank, and when will it move from an interesting feature found on luxury cars to the mainstream market?
Given the above, picking dates, especially those as close as within the next decade, seems very optimistic indeed. If you are up for a deeper dive into the what and how of forecasting disruptive tech, check out my series here.
What are your experiences with trend forecasting, and especially de-risking the scenarios before investing? Please drop me a note or leave a comment below.
