Ideas Before Their Time
| posted by Heath RowFC Now reader Bob Knight emailed earlier this week with the following:
I'd like to hear more about ideas that are either TOO good to market believably, or just too far ahead of their time. How do we time-shift our audiences to a place in the space-time continuum to make these very marketable dreams a reality in the marketplace?And what happens to these forerunners if their ideas don't take root?
Do you have any examples of ideas before their time? Products and services that are just too good to be true?
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
July 7, 2004 at 9:37pm
walterI have many, serious inquiries only.
July 8, 2004 at 12:55am
Bill WilsonThe question seems a little skewed. I can think of several products that were "before their time," but ultimately failed because of critical flaws or implementation problems. Take PDAs for instance... the Apple Newton really defined the concept, but the actual implementation failed due to a couple critical flaws.
Current PDAs are just about perfect, yet the market for pure PDAs is shrinking. The real growth is in cell-phones with PDA features. The market finally produced an implementation with wide appeal, after several iterations of the concept.
The way to shift the audience so that radically new products become successful is to meet the audience's needs, pure and simple. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the product is... if it doesn't meet the need, it won't get adopted.
July 8, 2004 at 10:39pm
Amanda ThomasThe recently discontinued modified endowment contract (Wealth Transfer product) offered through Pan American Life was too good to be true. The benefits were a little too high for consumers to believe. The commissions were too high for the agents. And, the bonuses were too high for the IMOs and MGAs. Pity.
August 19, 2004 at 12:35pm
Bert MulderBuckminster Fuller decided after experiencing ongoing failure to pick up on his ideas that many of his ideas and inventions were ahead of their time (which in this case means 25 to 50 years ahead of its time!). He adopted a practical solution: never start or expect large scale development before that and discourage individual developers to start on them...
i think all innovation cycles through several generations of idea forming, tryouts and small or large scale adoption during which the different infrastructures needed for that (mind set, legislation, businessmodel, technology) have sufficiently matured to support large scale deployment. some innovators are bound to certain cycles, and some follow products through all cycles.
innovators should know where they are in the cycle, and adjust their energy investment to that. this internal innovation roadmap helps them spend their energies wisely.
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