Novelty Disdain

"The larger point [from agtech] is that the empirical Anglo-Saxon approach to science clashes with the EU’s top-down precautionary principle, which tends to treat novelty as guilty until proven innocent"
― Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Broadsheet International Affairs Editor & columnist

There's plenty of models around new product adoption. Ancient Greek writings show trying to push innovating (kainotomia, 'cutting a new vein'). Machiavelli warned on the perils of new ideas making enemies (see his timeless quote on "a new order of things").

For modern-day business, ever since Everett Rogers 1962 breakthrough Diffusion of Innovation depiction of a normal distribution curve giving us early adopters (and earlier) to laggards, the genre has been expanded, deepened and nuanced to such extent that solution sellers who ignore it doom themselves to fail.

My interventions as New Product Rescue began by osmosis. I was already helping Enterprise salesteams better sell. A theme was quick to present itself to me.

An all-hands glitzy launch event would herald an incredible opportunity in the shiny new ware. Assembled trumpeteers, chorus line and TV-style ringmaster sought to whip the salesteam into a salivating frenzy to go over the top and beyond the parapet.

And just as from those wartime trenches of old, sniper fire, indiscriminate shelling, and things like plain old terrible weather thwarted any forward gains.

I then witnessed first hand the carnage that consumed after such offensive ground to a halt.

Step away from the broader distraction that the above quoted assessment brings into play the classic spectrums around optimum size of government, regulation and state intervention.

Our solution sell point is clinical.

Those whom we seek to buy our new offering will themselves sit somewhere on a scale of 'propensity towards novelty'. Knowing their likely level of embrace of risk with any proposed project, but specifically one new to them (and the wider marketplace) is highly advisable before we commit our resource to a bid.

This is where said novelty is explicit. Important, as I have had occasion to advise salesteams to not pitch their new ware as 'new' at all.

Each potential target client can be plotted on such scale. Every buying unit could contain extremes towards both poles of it.

And don't be fooled into thinking that just because someone labels themselves as 'innovative' - say being within a move-fast-and-break-things style sector or selling their own 'newness' - they'll be more prone to permissive-by-default terms and take on that which is offered them in similar fashion.

Acknowledging all these discrepancies exist are fundamental to any new product launch we make. Are you doing so in your latest launch plans?