The IBIDG Innovation Cycle ™
Innovation Cycle™:
Innovation Phase
Hype Phase
Denouement Phase
Rational Growth Phase
Maturity Phase
Let me adopt these new phase names and write up a report categorizing the example industries:
The Innovation Cycle™ - Mapping Technologies to Value Creation
The path from innovative breakthrough to widespread productive adoption is rarely a straight line. The Innovation Cycle provides a unified framework for understanding both the technological maturity and financial value creation potential as new products and services evolve.
Innovation Phase
In the earliest stage, new potentially disruptive technologies like blockchain, digital twins, and service mesh architectures have been triggered by innovation sparks. Companies are pre-revenue, operating in a research and development capacity as they build out proofs-of-concept.
Hype Phase
Early successes lead to inflated expectations and hype around the price/potential of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things. Companies are pre-profit but may generate some revenue from pilot programs as they attempt to meet overly optimistic projections.
Denouement Phase
Eventually, the innovation fails to deliver on the initial hype as actual implementations disappoint. In this phase, technologies like additive manufacturing undergo a denouement - a discounted growth period. Companies pour investments into iterating and refining their offerings, remaining pre-cash flow positive.
Rational Growth Phase As the real-world applications become better understood, a technology's rational growth path emerges. Solutions like cloud computing, DevOps, and low-code platforms find production use cases and scale. Companies span a mix of revenue and profitability phases as growth opportunities are priced more reasonably.
Maturity Phase
Widespread productive adoption is achieved, integrating the innovative technology into countless solutions and use cases. Customer relationship management, power generation technologies, and machine learning have reached this stage, with leading players potentially deeming themselves pre-dividend, able to return value to investors.
The Innovation Cycle provides a framework for mapping a technology's evolution alongside the typical value creation model as companies progres from innovation spark through the hype cycle and phases of growth towards maturity and profitability. Understanding this cycle is key for businesses to successfully commercialize and generate returns on innovative new products and services over time.
Giddeon Gotnor
