The innovation razor: The hard truth about tech scaling

Opinion

To explain why some technologies take hold whilst others languish unused in the garage, Phil Rowley explains three key consumer requirements: interoperability, infrastructure, and Improvement.

Here’s a personal story that explains how we’re often wrong about technology. 

I am old enough to remember visiting my grandparents’ house in a small mining village in the East Midlands and watching them cook my Sunday dinner on an open fire. 

Not an oven, but a series of metal shelves that were fitted around the coal fireplace in the kitchen. Pots and pans would bubble with water as they perched in front of a raging fire, as smoke billowed up the chimney. This was in the 1980s. 

At some point, my Mum bought them an electric oven, and they never looked back, using it until they passed away. For them it was a game changer – albeit belated. 

At the same time, my Mum upgraded her electric oven for the latest piece of kitchen technology – a microwave. Microwaves were hailed as the replacement to the oven, with books, TV shows and cooking classes evangelising about how a microwave could deliver Sunday roasts, sponge cakes and curries. 

Fast-forward to today. Whilst electric ovens are still very common, microwaves turned out not to be the culinary earthquake predicted, and are relegated to reheating takeaways and defrosting bread. 

But this is not an article about electric ovens versus microwaves. This is a lesson on how, as consumers and marketers, we are wooed by the excitement of new tech but are often disappointed once it’s in use. 

How might we make better predictions about what tech will be in constant rotation versus what will be shoved to the back of the cupboard? How can we know what consumers will adopt and what they will neglect? And how can we apply that to marketing?

Not scaling is failing

From 3D Printing to 3D TVs, and from VR to NFTs, the benefits of a new technology are often shouted from the rooftops: 

It will replace appliance x”  

You’ll never need to y again” 

Imagine having z at your fingertips” 

But beyond the din of self-promotion, the true test of a tech only comes once consumers start using it at scale. Anything else is just theory. 

In his book, Breakneck: China’s Quest To Engineer The Future, analyst Dan Wang makes a crucial point about his country’s approach to technology. 

Writing about the phenomenal expansion of China’s technological prowess, Wang states that China does not consider innovation delivered until it has scaled. Inventions that remain in labs, or that are not adopted en masse, remain inventions – not innovations.

True innovations need to make an impact at a societal level. That’s not an easy job: within societies, consumers can often be a tough crowd. So, to explain why some technologies take hold whilst others languish unused in the garage, I think we need to codify three key consumer requirements.  Crack all three, you can scale to claim your ‘innovation’ prize.

Interoperability, Infrastructure, Improvement 

Requirement 1 is Interoperability, which is the need for new technology to align with its environment.

Not only must it ‘play nicely’ with other technologies, but it also can’t require an immediate abandonment of existing ways of working. This is the psychology behind the acronym MAYA – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable – which describes the careful balance between novelty and familiarity. 

Indeed, that word ‘Acceptable’ is vital to understanding how technologies are received: the irony that even the most disruptive innovations must operate alongside existing technologies and chime with existing behaviours. Solutions that bring upheaval may thwart adoption.  

Meanwhile, Infrastructure refers to the presence of robust and reliable support networks. Technology never works in isolation: it must always plug into something, run on something, be located near someone.

Furthermore, when things go wrong – as they inevitably do – there must be the option to troubleshoot, activate built-in redundancy, and access quality customer service. 

Last, Improvement. New tech must increase or decrease a nominated metric, such as speed, cost, effort, or value. We buy technology to make some aspect of our lives better. If all metrics remain the same, why would we buy it in the first place?

Let’s look at the application of these three factors.

Failure in the field

Returning to the microwave: whilst microwaves have indeed scaled, they failed to totally supersede the oven for two reasons. 

First, it rapidly became apparent that the burning of sugars that occurred when you fry or grill food, a process that creates great taste, was hard to achieve in a microwave. Food cooked from the inside out, not vice versa, meaning internal moisture steams the food from the centre, leading to wet, wobbly meals. In short, it was not an improvement. 

Second, interoperability – in this case with standard kitchen processes. Those cooking with multiple ingredients could use a hob’s four rings and oven simultaneously. You can boil potatoes whilst you fry chicken and oven-bake a soufflé, all on one appliance. Microwaves had a single cavity, meaning you could only really cook one thing at a time; it couldn’t operate as an oven.    

It’s not just 80s culinary technology where we see those three ‘I’s play out. 

Testing the matrix across industries 

Take 3D cinema. Hailed as the replacement for regular movie screens, with some directors claiming they would never make a 2D film again, adoption soon stalled. 

Why? Although it was interoperable with existing cinema tech and used its infrastructure, the experience was not a significant enough improvement over 2D, with patrons noting they simply stopped noticing the effect after 10 minutes, making the higher ticket price difficult to justify.

Or who remembers the Segway Scooter? Billed as the future of personalised transport, this futuristic cross between a unicycle and a pogo stick lacked interoperability with existing networks; too slow for roads, but too fast (and dangerous) for pavements. 

Again, we might have predicted that with a framework.  

Applying the framework to what comes next

When we’re thinking about the next big thing, it’s also worth applying that same framework. 

Flying taxis, for instance. There’s no doubt they would improve journey times compared with a conventional taxi or the wearying rigmarole of airports. But is the infrastructure there? Some analysts believe the complete lack of ‘vertiports’ is a massive blocker. Furthermore, interoperability with existing air traffic control processes is a huge challenge.

Or take household robots. Arriving in a blaze of publicity in the last year, one might think that robot butlers are nearly upon us. But again, let’s make sure we apply our critical thinking.

Moravec’s Paradox states that robots find physical tasks, such as folding laundry and washing dishes, much more taxing than intellectual ones. Meanwhile, the Cowan Paradox is the famous socioeconomic theory that technological advances in household appliances did not reduce the hours spent on housework. Will robots be any different? In short, will they be interoperable with our homes? Will robots improve the metrics of our lives?  And therefore, will they honestly scale?  We must ask these questions.

The marketer’s strategic razor

When a technology is introduced as a revolutionary replacement for its forebears, whether it’s cars superseding horses, or crypto replacing cash, its use case in the field is the ultimate best test. Not whether it is a superior technology on paper. 

Existence is not enough. Invention is not enough. It’s all a hypothesis until tested at scale. 

To scale, tech must address consumers’ most pointed questions: 

Do I have to change my life to use it? 

Will the makers help me whilst using it?  

Will it improve the metrics of my life?

As marketers looking for new tech opportunities, we can use this ‘razor’ to make more discerning choices. 

We need a filter for separating durable platforms from flashy demos. We need to know where to place bets, where to be sceptical, and where to wait. We need a way to understand the differences in consumer potential between mobile and the Metaverse. 

The most exciting technologies are not always the ones that win. The winners are the ones that fit, function, and improve people’s lives enough for them to keep using them. 

For marketers, that makes the field test the only test that really matters. 

Phil Rowley is head of futures at Omnicom Media Group UK and author of Hit the Switch: The Future of Sustainable Business. He writes for The Media Leader about the future of media.