When innovation outruns customers' interest: practical cases from the video game industries

Abstract

“The pace of technological progress can, and often does, outstrip what markets need.” – Clayton M. Christensen

A short sentence, but one full of meaning. It is in this way that I decided to start my dissertation, with what I believe may be the frame around which to build my argument – that sometimes companies do not realize their promotion efforts can be counterproductive. By overexposing people to products that (given the right time and conditions) may had disrupt the market, organizations can potentially find themselves with great innovations, but no one to sell them to. The quote opening this dissertation was first pronounced by Clayton M. Christensen. In his book "Innovator's Dilemma", Professor Christensen distinguishes between two main macro-categories of innovation. To the first kind belong those technologies that are meant to “improve the performance of established products.” Along with sustaining technology, there exists disruptive technology – and, by extension, disruptive innovation. Disruptive technologies are harder for the general public to grasp and incorporate into their daily lives. As such, they require time and maturity before becoming part of a larger market.

My dissertation tries to be a helping hand for those individuals who want to better understand what innovative changes their product is going through. Towards this objective, I’ll be making use of a specific technological industry – video gaming.

My dissertation will be divided as follow: 1) The first chapter shall summarize the convoluted six decades of history of gaming with a more technological/productional eye. 2) The second chapter will dive deeper into assessing how demand has changed over the course of the years. 3) The third chapter will be listing and evaluating each innovative trend of the recent years.

Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 will take into analysis one of the itemized trends previously inquired and make it a practical case. It will be needed to audit if our rationale in chapter 3 mirrors what people say and do in regards of the innovation chosen for our study. The idea is to use Behavioral Economics and software to collect directly from social platforms (such as YouTube) the different conversations between gamers and prospective gamers. To be able to do a first skimming of what queries to focus on, we will make use of both mediacloud.org and Google Trends. Through these means, we want to understand what thematic trend (first seen in Chapter 3) we should focus on, the media/press coverage of such topics and what possible opinions are been expressed through the social media.

The conclusion to the essay will see the comparison between the findings of our analysis – what the gamers really say online on said trend – and what we theorized in chapter 3, based on the studies held in the first two chapters. Ultimately, we should be able to suggest to businesses a middle ground between what innovations might come in future years and what consumers would be willing to try and – most importantly – pay for.

By reading this dissertation, enterprises should be able to run similar analyses on the other highlighted trends in chapter 3, or on different technological industries. Hopefully, they will be able to understand what future trends the businesses should pay attention to, both in the short-term (sustaining technology trends) and in the future (disruptive technology trends), and the best approach given these findings.