Great Technology Will Not Find A Market
Why breakthrough technologies keep failing to become industries
I’ve spent the last few years watching the same thing happen over and over and over again.
A technology hits an extraordinary milestone. Like, I dunno, fusion holds plasma longer than ever, or quantum computer solves something that should have been impossible, or a lab grows a protein that didn’t exist in nature. The press coverage is breathless and a new VC fund is raised in an attempt to stake a claim to this unfolding future.
And then… nothing.
The standard explanation for the lack of commercialization of these types of technologies is that they are “early.” In other words, if you give them time and let the costs come down, the private sector will eventually figure it out. And by “it”, I mean the whole commercialization thing.
But given all the time in the world, and the “it” never happens, because the problem is not actually that the technology is early at all.
This paper introduces the core framework that I call architecture lag, which much better outlines the issues holding back commercialization across these novel technologies.
I won’t rehearse the argument here, but I will say: if you’ve ever wondered why technologies that clearly work keep failing to become industries, this paper offers an answer. And it has important implications for how most governments currently spend their innovation budgets, and how VCs intend to generate returns.
This article draws on a companion academic paper, “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem,” which develops the co-evolutionary architecture model, formal viability criteria, and cross-domain evidence in full. Available on request: s@sinead.co