“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens” — Rainer Maria Rilke
In a modern reinterpretation of H.G. Wells’ timeless classic, “War of the Worlds” (2005), humanity faces an onslaught from a technologically superior alien force. There is a small detail in the movie, often overlooked. In the scene (embedded below), Tom Cruise discovers the aliens had buried tripods on Earth many years ago. When they were ready to attack they “rode lightning” to pilot the tripods to the surface. Despite the impracticality of this “means of transport”, these tripods serve as a potent metaphor for rapid adoption in the presence of a pre-installed base. A sufficiently large installed base of technology marks a departure from the traditional Bell Curve to the Shark Fin model proposed by Paul Nunes and evolving finally into what I propose as the “I” Curve.
This evolution reflects a seismic shift in market dynamics, propelled by the acceleration of technological advancements and the ubiquity of digital information. The result is that we must adopt an emergent approach to strategy, we must embrace mental agility and accept that we will get it wrong to get it right.
In this Thursday Thought, we explore the impact of rapid adoption from two perspectives. The first is the impact on market adoption from the bell curve to the shark fin. The second is the impact on organisations, industries and individuals from the S-curve to the I-curve.
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From Bell Curve to Shark Fin
The Bell Curve — popularised by Everett Rogers — outlines a progressive market adoption through segments ranging from innovators to laggards. Marketers have long used bell-shaped curves to describe the diffusion cycles of their products. While this curve can be frustratingly slow for impatient startups, it can be devastatingly quick for some.
Paul Nunes calls this “catastrophic success” and shares the example of the artisanal apparel start-up American Giant. A single favourable mention on Slate.com launched the company into the stratosphere. In a single day, they received 5,000 orders for a hooded sweatshirt — a level of demand the company couldn’t satisfy. “Four days later, we had nothing left,” Bayard Winthrop, the company’s embarrassed founder, told the BBC. “We were down to the sticks in our warehouse.
Technological advancements have significantly increased the pace at which innovations are adopted by markets. Digital dissemination has democratised information. The combination of these forces enables consumers to leap en masse to new products at launch (or thanks to a favourable mention), effectively skipping the slow climb of Rogers’ adoption curve.
When plotted over time, the adoption curve of these innovations now mirrors a stark shark fin shape, a stark deviation from Everett Rogers’s traditional bell curve of diffusion. Rogers’s detailed segmentation into five distinct market categories has been condensed into just two groups: trial users, who contribute to product development, and the broad majority. Products that disrupt the market, along with the companies behind them, experience a swift ascent, only to plateau and decline with almost equal rapidity.
Our guest on this week’s episode of The Innovation Show is Ian Morrison, futurist and author of “The Second Curve”. Ian and his team at the Institute for the Future wrote the book in 1995. While it can be difficult to get everything right, futurists can certainly shed light on future directions. One thing Ian certainly got right is encapsulated as follows. “Leading-edge second-curve companies are going to have shorter moments in the sun. As the power of technology amplifies, and as the connectivity of a global wired world increases, these moments in the sun shorten for second-curve pioneers. And the speed with which new curves have to be built becomes even greater.”
This implies that your product may skyrocket to success overnight, only to rapidly become a fleeting trend that fades away just as quickly. Paul Nunes shares the example of Pokémon Go. It is what he describes as a “big-bang disrupter,” a new product that reigns uncontested for a period of success that is often shorter than one would expect from traditional market dominators.
For Pokémon Go, the “Shark Fin” submerged after just a few months. Initially, it drew 7.5 million players in its first week, peaking at 28.5 million players who engaged for an average of 1.25 hours daily the following week. However, interest waned quickly, with the game losing 15 million players within a month and nearly petering out after 10 weeks.
This decline had significant financial implications. Nintendo, which has a stake in the Pokémon characters licensed to the game’s developer, Niantic, saw about $6.7 billion in value vanish. Early revenue of $35 million led investors to boost Nintendo’s market value by $23 billion, but this spike was short-lived, and values plummeted by the end of summer. The Shark Fin was well and truly gone.
Beyond the impact of new products, my interest in this Thursday Thought is more focused on the imminent need for reinvention for organisations, their structures and most importantly their collective mindsets. If the marketplace can change so rapidly, a business can find itself in a red ocean very quickly indeed.
From S-Curve to I-Curve
For followers of The Thursday Thought and The Innovation Show, you will be familiar with the S-curve. S-curves follow the shape of the letter S, like a wave with flat growth at the bottom of the S. Slow and gradual growth comes next, followed by a steep curve culminating in a plateau phase at the top of the S. Typically, the S curve is presented in three broad phases: growth, scale, and maturity. The S-curve signifies a phased approach to market penetration, marked by a distinct lag between introduction and widespread acceptance.
This pattern has been the bedrock of market strategy, providing a predictable path for product development, marketing, sales, organisations, and industries. The curve’s shape reflects a natural period of market education and acceptance, allowing companies to refine their offerings and scale their operations organically. However, the S-curve’s predictability has been upended in recent years.
In the image above (from Asymco), note the gradual adoption of recent technologies spanning 1900 to 2074. The adoption curve is slow and steady, the slower speed gave us plenty of time to adapt. As we approach the far right of the graph, we see increasingly faster adoption and diffusion rates.
In stark contrast to the progressive S-curve, we now see a rapid, near-vertical adoption trend: the I-curve. This new paradigm is characterised by an almost instantaneous reach to a large base of users, often global in scale, at once following a product’s release. The installed base of technology — a critical mass of consumers already connected and ready to adopt — has catalysed this abrupt shift.
Today, because the internet is like electricity and globally accepted and available, the rate of adoption can be immediate and thus empowering or devastating depending on which side of Schumpeter’s gale you find yourself. The adoption rate of ChatGPT speaks for itself.
The emergence of the I-curve represents a transformative shift, where products can swiftly reach massive scale, driven by digital platforms, the compounding power of network effects, and the rapid spread enabled by social media. This leapfrogging over traditional growth stages propels products directly into the mainstream market with unprecedented velocity.
Organisations must not only foresee and ready themselves for immediate and expansive demand but also to master rapid expansion (and exit markets when needed). The imperative for companies in the era of the I-curve is to be nimble, inventive, and deeply committed to engaging users in a marketplace where attention is elusive, and loyalty is hard-won.
Historically, technological upheavals that reshaped the workforce, like the advent of farm machinery, unfolded over lengthy timespans, allowing for a gradual integration into the economic fabric. This allowed workers to adapt, whether through upskilling, reskilling, natural career transitions or retirement. Businesses too had the luxury of time to recalibrate. Such transformations were slower, partly because scaling up — be it steam engines, cars, or shipping containers — meant designing new factories and establishing novel supply chains from scratch.
Today’s digital revolutions, powered by machine learning, AI, mobile technology, and cloud computing, differ starkly. They surge forward with astonishing speed for several reasons. Their software-centric nature eliminates the need for heavy capital investment. Digital tools are inherently more adaptable and can be adopted more swiftly, often simply requiring a shift in data flow from human operators to AI systems. Unlike their tangible predecessors, these digital innovations spread globally instantaneously, riding on the back of existing infrastructure already embedded in daily life. The pandemic’s push toward technology adoption has notably accelerated this trend.
The remote work imperative spurred an urgency to find digital alternatives to human labour. And, as tools like Microsoft Co-pilot prove, the integration of new functionalities into existing installed bases can catalyse immediate adoption. Co-pilot’s seamless melding with Visual Studio illustrates how eliminating transition costs can lead to rapid and widespread uptake of modern technology.
Tesla’s handling of a recall in 2017 epitomises this shift. Instead of a costly, drawn-out physical recall, they solved the issue with an expedient software update. This software update was akin to the aliens beaming down into a technology that had been quietly marinating for decades.
These patterns repeat across sectors, where the pace of delivering value has intensified, demanding that organisations, regardless of size, match this new cadence. We are on the precipice of a new era where speed is not just an advantage, but a necessity — a world where the I-curve not only defines market adoption but also dictates the tempo of our collective future.
Thanks for Reading
For more on the Speed of Change, check out the fascinating series with futurist Ian Morrison. Ian’s revisit of his 1995 book has sparked several other episodes including the forthcoming 2-part episode with former CEO of Pitney Bowes, Mike Critelli and the first in our “Intersections” series with my good friend Paul Nunes and Ian Morrison sharing observations and overlaps.
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“I” Curves and the Power of the Pre-Installed Base was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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