When interpreting the maturity curve, we recommend focusing on the predicted future state of a microculture or topic. This provides the clearest guidance on investment timing and scale for your business.
Why prioritize the predicted state over the current one? Because it reveals both the expected trajectory and time frame, helping you determine how long you have to bring solutions to market that meet emerging consumer needs.
Comparing multiple trends side by side also clarifies which opportunities to prioritize, ensuring you maximize business value.
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 Insights Leaders, we define a predicted maturity of 33% to 55% as the Zone of Innovation—the stage where ideas related to a topic have achieved mainstream acceptance.
To develop the Zone of Innovation, we tracked 200+ initiatives and over 1,000 trends and topics that our clients brought to market over nearly two years. These included new products, brand launches, renovations, campaigns, investments, and acquisitions.
Our benchmarking revealed that initiatives launched after a culture crossed 33% maturity quickly achieved mainstream relevance.
In contrast, those introduced too early, in the Early Consensus stage, took longer to gain traction and faced greater scrutiny and potential disruption.
The same applied to initiatives launched beyond 55% maturity. At this stage, the market was already too mature for net-new products, and launches had to compete on branding, marketing, access, and price rather than cultural momentum.