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You’re probably quite familiar with Gartner’s hype cycle (above) which describes the stages of hype, disillusionment, and then actual productivity that many new innovations go through. However, one of the not so obvious implications of it is that the real value in any innovation only gets unlocked when people start to figure out how, when and where to use it. Another way of stating this is that:

The value is not in the innovation itself, rather it’s in understanding how, when and where to use that innovation.

I think this insight is also quite important when overlaid upon the discussion around specialisation vs. integration that I started yesterday. Specialised businesses can each be thought of as separate innovations. In the marketing world we might think of these as SEO companies, social media companies, mobile application developers, Facebook developers, Advertising agencies etc.

While each of these are important, the real value doesn’t lie at this level, instead, I’d argue, that the real value lies at the level of deciding how, when and where to deploy each of these different companies in order to solve a business problem.

The real value is in the creative and/or strategic combination ...