If adoption is what matters...
The Curious Path Issue #2
When we think of innovation, we often envision the inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientists who create groundbreaking technologies. We often overlook the everyday individuals adopting and integrating innovations into their lives and by doing so actually allow these ‘inventions’ to become an ‘innovation’.
When defining innovation, I like to draw on the work of Anthropologist Gisela Welz, who defined it as "the invention and implementation of new things, knowledge, and practices, which arises when unprecedented solutions to problems are conceived and subsequently put into action". Today, much of the conversation surrounding innovation is centred on how we can create the conditions for people to generate new and novel ideas. That plays into our strong belief in the power of individuals and groups to be bringers of change and transformation within society.
However, to bring about any change is intimately connected to ideas, values, and images of what is better, healthier, richer. Our current approaches advocate that by developing intricate understandings of people, their pain points and motivations we will be able to identify new angles through which to introduce new products and services for them.
This current innovation narrative has largely been developed and defined by post-industrialized nations. Beginning in the 1970s as these nations faced a decline in their perceived rate of innovation, they turned to study the Science and R&D landscape in an effort to understand what conditions lead to innovation.
But this current narrative, fails to account for the unique contexts found in many countries not part of these early industrialised nations. Countries around the world all have unique combinations of economic development, culture, working practices and legal structures that shape how people think and how innovation is defined and practiced.
My near decade spent living and working in China provided me with many opportunities to witness what a different take on innovation looks like. China’s innovation landscape provides many examples that challenge the prevailing wisdom of today’s discipline.
What led to this?
China has over the past few decades undergone rapid economic growth and urbanization, that has led to transformative change within the country. Its GDP growing 35 times larger, surpassing the growth of the second-ranking country by three times. This astounding economic evolution has shaped the expectations of progress for the 700 million Chinese under 40. Comparatively, while American Millennials witnessed significant changes, the scale of transformation is incomparable. Since 1990, the U.S. per capita GDP has grown by roughly 2.7 times, while someone born in China during the same period has seen their per capita GDP grow by an astounding 32 times.
These transformations extend beyond the economic realm to the physical and mental landscape of China's people. The speed of change is evident not only in the rapidly evolving physical infrastructure but also in the shifting mental outlook, shaping expectations for progress and influencing perceptions of society, technology, and government. Living through such unparalleled change has created an environment where adopting and embracing rapid technological advancements, started out as a necessity and later evolved into second nature behaviour for much of Chinese populace.
The widespread adoption of mobile payment technology in China illustrates the country's propensity for innovation. In early 2019 Apple announced with much fanfare that 383 million phones around the world had activated Apple Pay—but at that point only 24% of U.S. iPhone owners had ever actually used the technology. Things unfolded very differently in China, where WeChat Pay has won 84% market penetration among smartphone users. That kind of penetration explains why in 2018 WeChat Pay did 1.2 billion transactions a day, whereas Apple Pay did one billion a month. This prevalence of mobile payments has given China a huge means of introducing an array of new products and services.
In the mid-2010s, the streets of China's bustling cities witnessed the birth of one such two-wheeled product – that of bike sharing. Spearheaded by pioneers like Ofo (2014) and Mobike, this innovation transformed urban commuting in a country with relatively low car ownership and an increasing need for affordable transportation solutions. Unlike most bike-sharing schemes in other countries, shared bikes in China did not require docking stations, meaning users could drop them off anywhere.
As these companies rolled out their fleets of colourful, dockless bicycles, the competitive landscape quickly intensified. Countless operators vied for dominance in the emerging bike-sharing market.
Loose regulations at the outset allowed these companies to flood the streets with bicycles, providing a newfound and affordable transport option for millions. By 2017, Ofo had one million bicycles in 34 cities. Mobike had five million.
Leveraging China’s vast manufacturing base, low regulatory barriers, growing thirst for consumer location data and a surge in demand for convenient and affordable transportation fuelled a frenzied rush into the space. Every street corner seemed adorned with the distinctive frames of Ofo's yellow bikes or Mobike's silver-orange cycles. The battle for market share was fierce, as each company sought to outdo the other in terms of fleet size, app features, and service coverage. Ofo attempted to keep costs low by not including a GPS unit on the bike and using instead the location data from the mobile user, other iterations tested out included; airless tyres, 3 spoke wheels, a variety of bells, frame shapes, many iterations of seat adjustment levers. At its peak new bike iterations would launch on a monthly basis.
But none of these innovative iterations would have been possible without the demand and adoptive nature of people in China. The companies were able to do the type of iterative design and testing normally reserved for the prototyping phase of a project - in the real world. The level of refinement of their bikes and service they were able to achieve in a matter of a couple of years would ultimately give them the confidence to launch globally.
The concept of shared usage in China would go on to proliferate into an array of shared products from docks for mobile phone chargers to umbrellas and cars.
To conclude, without adoption an innovation and its potential impact remain limited. Therefore, when we conduct research seeking to understand 'early adopters', we should note that these individuals may not be in the country where the innovation was created. In today's highly connected world, the early adopters of an innovation could exist anywhere. In fact, it is typically the countries undergoing rapid economic and social change where we find the most receptive and adaptable individuals. Therefore, when researching how the adoption of a new innovation will unfold, it's vital to look beyond the place that maybe initially inspired our idea and instead search for the people who are really ready to try out and test your innovation and put it through its paces.
. . .
