Guide to Technology Adoption Strategy

Making strategic decisions on technology adoption and selection

Technology Adoption Challenge

If you are running a business, almost every day is marked by a new cold outreach, advertising newest and greatest technology that will transform your business, create endless leads and quadruple revenue.

Nobody wants to “fall behind” and ignore the truly revolutionary technology that ends up disrupting the industry, but there are just too many options.

Which is why adopting tech reactively is so common. You may be trying to solve a problem or notice a shiny new feature rolled out by competitors - the solution is often to buy a product and move on to a different fire.

This approach works well for a very small company, but as you grow, this mismatched patchwork starts affecting your efficiency.

Instead, use a strategic technology adoption framework to simplify your decisions, focusing on business goals and keeping competitive edge without straining resources.

Strategic Technology Adoption Framework

The framework has four steps.

• Evaluate your resource capabilities.
• Determine new technology tolerance for your industry, team and customers
• Break out your business operations in segments and position each on technology adoption curve
• Use the positioning and resource audit to guide technology adoption decisions

Let’s dig in.

Understanding Technology Adoption Curve

Have you seen a bell-shaped technology adoption graphs? When something new emerges, adoption rarely happens in a linear pattern.

• Innovators run experiments and jump on any new technology immediately, evaluating new opportunities it allows and imagining creative ways it can benefit their business.
• Early adopters are inspired by innovators and can spot strategic advantages. They have to figure out practical challenges and learn as they go.
• Early majority observe adopters and may consider new tech if results are worth it. They may need to be convinced that investment brings desired returns.
• The late majority would only consider new tech when it becomes standardized best practice in their industry.
• Laggards are driven by necessity. They may wait until it’s no longer possible to continue business as usual.

How to decide on your position on the curve

It’s both simpler and more difficult for smaller businesses to be “early”.

It is simpler because the smaller size allows for quick changes and nimble responses to feedback. It is more difficult because a certain percentage of new technologies and products simply do not pan out, wasting resources (although you do learn something in the process).

A new tech may look perfect and exciting on paper but lack results during practical tests.

And so the question of resources is a first step of the framework.

Defining resource availability

When a new technology emerges, there are few clearly defined playbooks and use cases. It requires experimentation and finding experts to help you who have practical experience is difficult - because technology is so new.

And that means to be an early adopter you must have at least one of the following:

• Budget to pay for Research and Development
• Internal talent already on the payroll who can dedicate certain amount of time from regular duty to be your innovation team
• High tolerance of your customers or staff for experiments that do not work as expected
• Your business tolerance for risk.

Moving up the curve requires progressively less resources (for example, early and late majority may enjoy a low cost bundled SaaS) - except for laggards who would pay significantly more to modernize their business.

While resource cost may decrease, the opportunity cost will increase - while it’s not necessary to be first to market, it will take some scrambling to catch up to your customer’s new expectations.

Figure out the best combination of risk that fits your business model.

Knowing your market

Nobody expects electronic produce scanners at the Farmers Market.

Industries have different speed of innovation and staying inline with your peers is necessary. If you are in digital marketing, innovating every few years would quickly place you behind.

Industry is not the only deciding force. What are the technological expectations and readiness of your team and customers? Would adding AI powered search delight or intimidate your clients? Would adding a chatbot to your website be seen as helpful or frivolous?

You may also consider a hybrid approach. For example, your team may lean more on latest tech for daily operations - while customers prefer more traditional approach.

To dial in the accuracy, segment your operations and evaluate each separately.

Here is an example on how you may do it:

• Technology visible to customers.
• Technology used by your internal team to support daily operations
• Your sales technology
• Infrastructure that supports the backbone of your business (like website and applications)

After creating segments, answer these questions for each:

• How tech-savy are the primary users?
• What would be the impact of technology failure?
• How much competitive advantage would you see from technology innovation?

You may choose to be late majority for the customer segment, early majority for daily operations and infrastructure and innovator for sales. Making this decision instantly places the guardrails around any new technology choice.

Use Cases: Framework Examples

Let’s examine how the framework may look across different industries.

Early Adopter: Clothing Retailer

Adding AI powered search allowed the traditional retailer to capture additional market by making it easier to discover a correct item and improve upsell recommendations. The change delivered intuitive user experience.
Because AI search incurring continuous expense, tracking sales increase metric was critical.

Late Majority: Small Credit Union

Credit Union adopted face login for their mobile app after it had been proven to be reliable and secure - and used by major financial firms with significant implementation budgets. The case studies were used to assist with rollout and staff training. As clients had experienced face login before, the solution was accepted easily.

Hybrid Approach: Roofing Company

Being an early-stage adopter of drone technology and visualization created a competitive edge: the customers could see the condition of their roof in real time and have an easier way of picturing the completed job.

However, updating internal operations to cutting-edge solutions would not result in a significant return on investment or solve additional business problems.

Do Not Forget About Requirements

No matter where you land on the technology adoption curve, remember to define clear business outcomes, specific problems the technology should solve, and success metrics.

Innovation Does Not Mean Automatic Competitive Advantage

Investing in early technology adoption does not guarantee competitive advantage - and in many cases, being a follower brings assured benefits.

To create the advantage, develop a technology adoption strategy that brings all key elements together:

• Be realistic about your resource constraints and risk tolerance
• Be intentional about selecting tech that aligns with your business goals and use a decision framework to be consistent