Inside the Tornado review

They say that when you get a hammer, everything becomes a nail. I have been reading the book Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore for my Entrepreneurial Strategy class and it's model is my new hammer. The book makes total sense to me, (even though every single example comes from the high tech industry, which I know next to nothing about) and I plan to write two blog posts about topics I think it applies to. I plan to write about how social media is not quite ready for the pragmatists, and how the Product Development program at BYU can follow the strategy laid out in the book and be successful.

In order to do that, first let me explain the model in my own words for those who aren't familiar with it.

The tech adoption life cycle pictured above shows five distinct categories of buyers or groups who accept a new product or technology. The first is the innovators. These are typically the engineers or techie type people who like stuff just because its new and cool. They don't really push the product into market, they just get it for themselves. Think of your friend that is the first in line at the newest iPhone release.



The second group is the early adopters. They are the visionaries: people who see real value in a new technology and want to exploit it. They usually have some money to put into the project. Some of their key characteristics are that they are grabbing up a new product before it is fully usable. They take a product that is, say, 80% complete and tell the inventor "We will work together to put together the last 20%." These early developers are risk takers and go in not fully knowing what the product is really capable of, but they know it has potential. They usually think, "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had this technology, the world would be so much better or more efficient" etc. Typically they are a fairly small group in comparison to the market.


The third group is the early majority, also known as the pragmatists. To be sure I looked up what exactly pragmatism means from a dictionary standpoint. From m-w.com:

Pragmatism: a practical approach to problems and affairs

Basically, this model describes these people as ones who do not want a solution unless it is sure to work. They don't want an 80% solution, they want a 100% solution, or at least as close as they can get. "They are more interested in evolution than revolution" [Moore] and are more interested in making their systems work effectively and keeping the status quo. When they pick up a new technology they are sure to talk to their friends who have picked it up and ask what problems it has and who the market leader is. They then weight the options carefully. They tend to all move as a herd when a market leader is chosen because that market leader is seen as an infrastructure crucial to keeping the technology stable. This leads to the tornado the book talks about which is where the real growth of a company or the acceptance to a technology occurs. Before this happens, the product/innovation is still in its infancy, no matter how many people talk it up.

The last two groups are the late majority and the skeptics. The late majority, or the conservatives, only accept the product when it looks like they will be left behind if they don't. The skeptics rarely end up accepting the innovation, and if they do, they do so reluctantly.

The Chasm is the space between the visionaries and the pragmatists. There are some personality type issues that come into play which create this void, but I won't talk about those now. The bowling alley is a concept that will apply to to Product Development program strategy I will recommend later, but I won't talk about that now either.