Predicting the Next Tech Disruption from Big 3 Strategy Consulting firm Bain and Company discusses 4 forecasting tools (shown below) Bain uses to predict when disruptive technologies will be widely adopted.
Two of the tools - experience curves and adoption curves - have been around a long time and widely used.
For example, we use both - and especially adoption curves - in our forecasts. And much like McKinsey also suggests, Bain suggests using similar technologies to help you develop your adoption curves.
This is something we've done for many years and have found very useful.
Bain's Elements of Value tool is focused on consumer technologies. But we think it could be modified to also work with B2B tech. You'd just need to create the equivalent of Maslow's hierarchy for business users.
The tool we found most interesting is what they call barriers and accelerators.
We spend a lot of time examining potential barriers and countervailing trends that could impact our forecasts. This is because we've observed that most technology forecasts are overly optimistic because they don't include these.
A good example is drone forecasts back in 2014. The vast majority of these forecasts at that time simply ignored the wide range of barriers to broad adoption drones faced.
Other examples include autonomous car forecasts, Internet of Things forecasts back in the early 2000's and again in 2010 through 2015 and pretty much all the forecasts that A.I. and automation would eliminate huge numbers of jobs by 2020 that were put out 6-8 years ago.
In all these cases barriers and countervailing forces were either missed or ignored. So we certainly agree with Bain's inclusion of this tool.
Forecasting is obviously not easy and no one can actually predict the future. But using tools like the ones Bain suggests will help your forecasts miss by less.
Comments