The Holy Grail for innovators often is not simply to win in an existing market, but also to create an entirely new product category. But doing so raises a critical question for the entrepreneur: How do you get potential customers and investors to understand what it is you are doing?
It’s harder than it sounds. Consumers make sense of unfamiliar products by mapping them onto categories of things they already understand. So when Apple comes out with its iPhone 6, for example, it’s pretty easy for customers to understand that it’s a lot like the previous iterations. But genuinely novel products don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Indeed, their novelty stems from the very fact that the ideas and technologies that came together to create the new concept existed previously in domains or categories that were thought to be entirely distinct.
As a result, innovations that are totally new to the market are often extremely difficult to describe. Things that are difficult to describe are hard to understand.And things that are hard for consumers and investors to understand typically face two outcomes: They are either ignored or devalued...
Jesper Sørensen is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Read his full article here