Emerging Technology- Demographics and Economics (Third of Three in the series)

In the last two Emerging Technology blogposts, I wrote about the non-technical factors to adoption and success of emerging technologies.  The last component I would like to write about is the broader environment the technology innovation, as part of a system of technology surrounding an individual or company, is operating within.  This plays a critical part in the success of the broader technology.

As we have seen with the current macroeconomic conflagration, capital spending for IT projects in corporations has been almost exclusively frozen (or as an ex-VP of mine was quoted recently, the IT staff are burning through the remaining budgetary dollars in anticipation of a industry-wide freeze).  These economic slowdowns affect different portions of the globe at different rates of speed, as you can determine by the time-delay of financial bailout packages in the United States, Europe, and China.

A broader issue is the demographics of the adopters.  Unless you are targeting a specific age group or demographic segment with your technology, then you are most likely going to get adoption from the 24-30 age bracket (early adopters, traditionally), or the 30-50 age bracket (peak earning years and discretionary income).  Where this becomes interesting is when you plot age ranges (and associated economic brackets) on a region by region basis, as noted in a recent Economist magazine story regarding how the average age of child-bearing was effecting unemployment rates in Utah.

So, if you have a product or service that appeals to a specific age bracket, or requires a certain amount of discretionary income, you will need to look at not only the feature/functionality required by the customer base, but also the age-spreads by geography and where each geography is at present economically speaking.

We'll be using these three factors, adoption, combinatorial innovation, and Demography/Economy, as weighting when introducing new technologies on the Technology Intelligence Group.  As noted in prior blogposts, technological failure is seldom the determinant factor of success with emerging technologies, but rather these adjacent variables in the equation.