Most of our experience as consumers of new technical products comes at later stages in their development - just from a purely statistical perspective, unless you have a very active practice to seek out new things, most of the time when you encounter something for the first time, you’ll be in a later cohort (which is larger). It’s more unusual to encounter something in the early, messy stages.
This biases our understanding of how new products and tech come into existence. We already have a “narrative bias” that pushes us in the direction of telling neat stories about how things work. Combined with usually coming across things after some of the details have been worked out, this gives us the false perspective that when we are trying to find innovative ideas, we are always on the hunt for ideas that are well formed.
But the reality is that the valuable early signals are all messy and complicated. And it’s also the case that once you’ve spotted something that is well-established, it’s usually on the late side, so it’s harder to create new value and be competitive.
The right things to be on the lookout for are “small weirdos”. Small means that things are still at the early stage - not many people “get” it or are using it. You haven’t read about it in the press yet. “Weirdos” means that you initially might not understand why this small group of people are so enthusiastic about it, or, if you’re really early, you might think something like “that’s weird but I like using it”.
All kinds of new tech fit this pattern early on. You can see this right now across a lot of AI-related tech, for example, there are interesting, weird things happening that aren’t widely adopted yet.
It’s hard to stay sensitive to this pattern. We like social proof and we like status quo, so “something weird a small number of people are doing” has a tough time getting through those filters. But if you want to be an innovator and stay at the front of developing tech, small weirdos are where it’s at.
Have you read about “Lead Innovators” - captured well by Eric von Hippel at MIT Sloan. Basically, he has systematically laid out how to find and learn from “small weirdos” and explains why they exist, why they prove a market, and how to find and learn from them. We used the method to define Photoshop Extended….and other product teams could learn from the method.
You should reference it — it’s a practical and under referenced innovation tool!!