How can we identify and avoid meme technologies?
An R&D company challenged an early-stage company to a race: who could get acquired for more than a billion dollars first? The R&D company went through a long, iterative process. Minimum-viable products were created, tested with users, and then sent back for revision. Meanwhile, the early-stage company decided they could circumvent the entire development cycle. Instead of building a product, they built an idea and used social media to create hype around it. Whether the product existed or not, they could show a large number of people wanted it.
So, who wins this race?
In ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, the hare is so confident that he’ll win the race he chooses to take a nap halfway through, only to wake up to the tortoise slowly plodding past the finish line.
The race is a bit more complicated outside the world of fables. Some hype technologies will win the large valuations and get acquired by companies eager to accelerate their company. But true innovation takes time and patience for endless iterations. And adoption of innovative technologies takes even longer, as seen in the classic “innovation curve.”
THE INNOVATION CURVE VS THE HYPE CYCLE
Harbor recently sat down with Matthew Smith, CEO and founder of Fathym, a micro frontends platform for delivering future-proof web projects and applications, to talk about the lessons large companies can learn from startups on innovation, how to avoid overly hyped meme technologies, and the technology trends he’s most excited about.
INNOVATION LESSONS FROM STARTUP CULTURE
From Mr. Smith’s perspective, innovative companies have one thing in common: a flexible team where every person on the team has a basic understanding of technology. These teams are able to source ideas from all team members and better see how the product will come together and create value.
Product development is always a balancing act between trying to schedule innovation and understanding the underlying technologies and evolutions of technologies.
“If you’re having to train your team members to think about technology while they’re on the team, that becomes a pretty big impediment towards progress for any startup in this day and age,” he says.
AVOIDING MEME TECHNOLOGIES AND THE HYPE CYCLE
Mr. Smith points to machine learning as a recent hype cycle that drove massive investment into companies with relatively simplistic machine learning models. Meanwhile the truly game-changing under-lying technology, machine learning as a service, was becoming widely available on the cloud, enabling all of those companies to exist.
“I would say that from the perspective of a company that’s trying to stay ahead of the technology curve, they should really start looking at the technologies that are enabling the hype cycle and not focusing on the tech as it comes out in that hype cycle,” says Mr. Smith.
Web3, blockchain and cryptocurrency are experiencing the same hype cycle. The underlying technology has true value, but many of the companies built on top of it may be over-hyped.
“You don’t want to hear the words “Web3” and then go hire a million dollars’ worth of developers to start building smart contracts for your industrial IoT solution and not have any customer for that,” cautions Mr. Smith.
