The Shift From Technical Risk to Market Risk

When coming up with ideas for a new web or mobile technology, it’s important to ask, “Why hasn’t someone else built a successful business out of this already?”

With 7 billion people and counting, it is highly unlikely that no one had the vision or imagination to conceive the same idea. There are really only two answers: it was technically impossible to build, or they couldn’t get the market to adopt it. Web and mobile technology is at a stage in its lifecycle where the limiting factor is almost unanimously market adoption . In other words, the technology is by far the easy part; the hard part is getting people to care.

For a long time, it was extremely difficult to build any sort of interactive digital experience, and harder if it involved the Internet. Only a handful of the top technical minds in the entire world had ever succeeded at creating the first informational website or the first social network or the first digital photo gallery. Technical risk still dominates fields on the edge of innovation, like space travel, painless clean energy production or panacea cures for any range of seemingly incurable diseases. If these technical problems were able to solved, there is no doubt that customers would pay exorbitant sums for the benefits created. The risk of the market not adopting them is almost negligible.

But it’s not a good excuse for a digital experience under-performing in today’s world.

Today, the question is less about who is going to build your great idea, the question is more about who will take your great idea and bring it to market with the greatest impact.

You need all three components: vision, communication and technical execution. Leave out any one of them and you fail. Communication is the weakest link right now.

You can build anything, but are you building the right thing?

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