...successful innovation—seeing invention through to adoption—isn’t just about managing technical breakthroughs; it’s about managing people’s expectations. Always. Credibly aligning technical progress with past promises is the central challenge confronting most innovators.
... innovators stink at managing expectations. They’re either overly optimistic or unduly pessimistic. They haven’t a clue what new costs their innovations will impose on potential users. They have no credible way to assess what needs will be most important to those users three years hence.
But the reason innovators should read these tales of technologies past is emphatically not to “learn from the lessons of history.” Rather, it’s to see how expectations have changed over time. What expectations were innovators trying to create? How fast are those expectations changing, compared to market conditions? Determining this “expectations calculus” is essential to managing innovation.
