What is the Zone of Innovation?

What is the Zone of Innovation?

When people ask how they should interpret the maturity curve, we always recommend tracking the future (predicted) state of a microculture or topic as the best option for your business. 

Depending on where the future state lies, you will gain perspective on how quickly and how much of an investment you might want to consider for that idea to yield value to your business.

Why the predicted state and not the current state? Because the predicted state along with the predicted time frame gives us a better sense of how much time we have to bring solutions into market that address the emerging needs of the consumer.

By examining various microcultures or trends relevant to your business next to one another, you will quickly gain perspective on how to prioritize certain opportunities over others to extract maximum value for your business.

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The Zone of Innovation is THE IDEAL space for innovation for enterprises that need their products and solutions to have mainstream relevancy. This of course changes when organizations have varied goals, especially in situations where they may be considering innovations for one of their smaller portfolio companies.

The Zone of Innovation

At Lux for Predictive Anthropology, we call the span of 33% to 55% maturity the Zone of Innovation: when the ideas related to a topic have reached mainstream acceptance.

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To develop the Zone of Innovation, we tracked more than 200 initiatives (and over 1000 trends and topics) that our clients put into market over the course of almost two years. The initiatives we tracked included new product and brand launches, renovations, campaigns, and even investments and acquisitions.

Over the course of the benchmarking exercise we determined that any initiatives that were launched when the culture had crossed 33% on the maturity curve achieved mainstream relevancy very quickly.

In comparison, those that were launched too early in the Early Consensus stage took longer to achieve mainstream relevancy and were subjected to greater scrutiny and possible disruption along their journey.

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To learn more about the types of initiatives you can launch in various stages of maturity and how best to “time the market” read this article.

The same was true of initiatives launched beyond 55% in maturity. In the case of such initiatives, we found the marketplace was already too mature for net new products and any launches ended up competing for space with its competitors based on attributes such as branding, marketing, access, price, and other similar downstream levers.