Why People Adopt Technology

CAN’s product roadmap is driven by:

• Who adopts new technology
• Why they adopt new technology
• The hurdles they encounter

 
The adoption of new technology starts with play. Play is inquisitive and experimental. Try something, if you don’t like it: no worries, on to the next thing. The goal is to have a good time.
 
Work is about producing. Doing what you say you will, when you say. Work is about being dependable, known, dedicated. There is nothing inquisitive or experimental with work. Work is about doing what is known to produce value.
 
Value vs. Known
The most common fallacy is that value is what drives business adoption. It doesn’t, don’t act like it does. Known is more important than value, especially if value requires change. Anyone who is currently comfortable will take a bird in the hand vs. venture for two in the bush.
 
The Goal.
How can CAN build a product the allows play, but once familiar transforms work. This is one of the reasons that Twitter — Yammer: a similar service — has been able to gain substantial transaction among professionals for sharing knowledge.

• Open Source: In the technology community your credibility comes from what you have built. To stay current developers have to build outside of work. They use free open source software — with enterprise support, and once they have gain familiarity it often ends up in their work lives. Play becomes work.
  • Examples: Hadoop, R, Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, Backbone.js.

• That Next-Level: Take technology that people love to use in their personal lives to the next level. No new technology, but technology that is work ready. Yammer is a work ready version of Twitter and Facebook. Microsoft Lync is a work ready version of Microsoft Skype. Windows is a work ready version of Mac OSX.
  • Linux, Apache, Personal Computer, Drones, 3D Printing, iPhone

• Academic Bump: Professors provide advice to students as teachers and professionals as consultants. When possible providing software to professors — free or discounted — can spur adoption in businesses as students get jobs and consulting results are operationalized.
  • Qualtrics, SAS, SPSS,

 
MVP to Maturity:
Technology tends to mature from general to specific applications. Flint Scrapers evolved into a specific application of using sharp edges to process materials, e.g. knives, spears, axes, and cleavers.
 

• Cutting: Flint Scrapers evolved into a specific application of using sharp edges to process materials, e.g. knives, spears, axes, and cleavers.
• Digital Screen: A modern example is the splintering of digital screens from a lab tool into the variety of digital screens we have today. Matrix of light bulbs, CRT’s, Plasma, LED, Liquid Crystal.
• Personal Computer: Even the PC has evolved into a spectrum of diversity. Starting with desktop PCs, and moving to servers, laptops, mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, netbooks, cloud computing, and Internet of Things.

It is impossible to fight the extropy — the trend towards order — of the nature of technium — technology as a biological Kingdom. Technology will always fracture from general to specialized. CAN’s product roadmap leverages the nature of technology instead of fights it.