Emerging trends are the most important factor in determining if an innovation will be enormously successful or just moderately successful.

When I talk about emerging trends, I do not mean fads. A fad comes and goes in about one or two years. Moreover, fads are accompanied by a lot of buzz right from the beginning.

Emerging trends on the other hand bubble up slowly until the culture itself shifts. It is only during the cultural shift that the media buzz occurs. If you come in at the point of the shift you are late. You will still find success, but the most successful innovations occur before the cultural shift.

A current example of a cultural shift is the current trend of being “green” or environmentally friendly. Notice that being green is a trend and not and emerging trend. The shift has already begun and in fact is well underway. We know that greenness is not a fad because the need for it will not quickly go away, and moreover greenness is being adopted on a cross-cultural scale. The buzz around greenness started about two or three years ago and has become mainstream in the last year.

One of the best examples of an innovation for an emerging trend is the mp3 player (i.e. ipod) and the digital music stores (i.e. itunes). These innovations are the result of the emerging trend of stuff becoming transcendent. People are less and less tied to the idea that stuff is physically owned. People are buying the experience not the object. I purchase a song not a CD. It doesn’t matter to me if I have a file or a disc, because I bought the song. This trend has changed the music industry and is changing the movie industry. It will eventually change other industries as well; though that will take more time.

How do you innovate for an emerging trend? The first step is to identify an emerging trend. The innovation will then flow from there. A trend is a change in the way things are and are done. So you need to adapt to the coming change. There will be countless opportunities. The key is to identify the emerging trend. In my next post I will give you resources and tools for doing just that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Innovation Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.