How Do We Drive Technological Advances? Part II

In Part I, we noted that this is not the first time we tackled the driving of technological advances, having preciously tackled the issue back in 2014 in our 3-part series (Part I, Part II, and Part III) where we noted that any organization that wanted to excel in Supply Management had to master the three Ts: talent, transition (not process) and technology and focussed in on technology in particular. However, not much has changed since we last tackled the subject — new technology adoption in the majority of organizations is still low, and even though 47.3% of the world’s population was online last year, we’re not sure the same statistic holds true in the business world.

And while we can’t say for sure why technological advance is slow and adoption of new technology solutions is low in an average platform, we are pretty sure that it has something to do with the fact that, especially where the older generation is concerned, especially for the older generation, they’ve heard the same old story hundreds of times before — it’ll make your work faster and better and your life easier. And, over the years, they’ve tried dozens of systems that made this claim, but few, if any, have delivered and most that delivered some still had drawbacks. At this point, any talk of trying a new solution just fills them with dread. And that’s not a great starting point for anything.

So you have to not only get past the dread and the suspicion and the outright animosity but get the key stakeholder, who, in this case, is a primary user, to an open state of mind where she is ready to try it and, hopefully, not only see how it will make her daily life easier, but like it.

And this is more than creating great tech with a great UX (which the doctor has been writing a lot about lately across the S2P cycle because just creating a system that works isn’t enough anymore), it’s creating great messaging that gets the message across. And this is as much psychology as it is marketing and definitely more psychology and marketing than technology.

Think about early adopters. Why do they adopt? Theories iclude:

  • they like the social status it brings them
  • they like to be the expert on new technology … and adopting new tech allows them to do the product research they need to be the expert
  • they want to solve their needs before their peers to stay ahead of the crowd

So, if you are targeting early adopters, you need to keep this in mind and have messaging to drive these points home. And that’s sometimes easier said than done … as run of the mill messaging will be something your target audience has probably heard a dozen times before. So, be creative.

Any other ideas to drive technological adoption?