And How You Can Avoid Falling Into the Chasm
It’s a long established trend that if a technology becomes popular enough somebody will add it to the toaster. Electric toaster? Yes, and a good addition that has been! But the trend today of adding smart features to every product you sell may not be the best use of your innovation budget.
Meet Toasteroid, not the only smart toaster on the market but perhaps the one that made the biggest splash. Toasteroid was build around a simple concept: people like to know what the daily forecast is going to be when they eat breakfast. So Toasteroid addresses that customer need by toasting the daily forecast right onto your toast. Unique solution, yes, but is it an innovative solution?
My immediate reaction to Toasteroid is that no, it’s not an innovation. An innovation needs to create value not just be a unique combination of features. But I could be wrong. When Toasteroid first appeared on Kickstarter they raised $187,849 from almost 2000 backers.* This is a strong indication that having your weather forecast in your toast may actually add value to consumers.
This is the trap that many innovators fall into, or as Geoffrey Moore put it: the chasm. Moore discusses in his book Crossing the Chasm that high tech products have to cross a chasm between the early adopters and the majority. The problem is as innovators we are often visionaries ourselves and the early adoption by other technology enthusiasts can lead us into the chasm with no way out.
Then how do we avoid this trap? Keep your customer at the center of your process. Let’s take a look at what Toasteroid says about the process of making toast: “simply put the slices of bread into it, open the asteroid app, connect via Bluetooth, and choose the design you want your bread to have.” That really doesn’t seem that bad, except when you compare it to what I do today to make bread: load the bread, start the toaster, and check the weather on my phone while it cooks.
Take a look at the chart here, I may have oversimplified it on both sides but this compares a user’s experience on two parallel paths: top is a traditional toaster; and the bottom is the Toasteroid. This user experience map can be used to either compare workload or time, either way I think it clearly indicates that the Toasteroid is not adding value to the process.
Along both experience maps the user gets to enjoy the toast and knows what the weather is going to be. This also highlights another trap that innovators can often fall into: the no competitor trap. Toasteroid may have looked around and determined that no other toasters add the daily forecast to the bread and determined they have no competitor. This isn’t true, the competitor in this case is inertia.
Innovators and early adopters tend to have an easier time overcoming inertia, but the majority and the laggards of Moore’s curve will need more than, “look how cool this is” to overcome the inertia of using their current toaster. So how does an innovator cross the chasm?
Easy, add real value for the users to get the majority to overcome the inertia. Well perhaps easier said than done. Let’s stick with toasters since we already know it can be done as most of us are using electric toasters, perhaps the greatest innovation in the toaster space. Then how do we find the value?
There are many methods that can be used to find value for users. I’m a design thinker so I tend to push design thinking, empathy mapping, persona creation, and as exhibited above, customer experience mapping. Other methodologies will work too, the key is to keep the user at the center of the process. You can start with yourself in the toaster example, what do you value most in the morning: time, simplicity, or perhaps predictability?
I would say I value predictability and simplicity, I believe that those two done correctly will give me back more time. So my smart toaster needs to have an AI that uses ML to produce a perfectly cooked piece of toast every time. I simply want to pop in the bread and press cook button and my toast comes out exactly how I want it every time.
Now I’ve defined what I value and how I want to experience it, I’ll leave the development to the toaster experts. Just understand that I am a single data point, you as the innovator will need to go out and verify that I am part of the majority and not another early adopter false signal.