“The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.”
David Lloyd George
One of the biggest contributions to the initial excitement when you have a light bulb moment is the untold riches your new invention will bring.
People will love it; it will change the world; you can retire on the proceeds.
All these thoughts run through your head in less than a second, milling around with the thoughts connected with the inspiration itself. No small wonder that as your body is filled with such a cocktail of hormones that sanity can temporarily leave the room.
When your invention is grounded and the idea reaches production, a new reality sets in - you have to find people who want to make it, sell it, buy it and use it.
The marketing and sales effort has to kick in. If you are a ‘solopreneur’ - a one person band - that means it’s all down to you. Often this can be a source of dismay for someone who loves the creative process and, all too often, things can grind to a halt.
Having a brilliant idea is great, but actually bringing the light bulb moment into physical reality is still only a small fraction of the process.
The most well known model for product and service life cycle is shown below and it is particularly relevant for new technologies. It follows a bell curve derived from the Gaussian curve after the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
This curve also describes many other systems like quantum probability, genetic inheritance and even spread betting.
There is just one anomaly in this version known as The Chasm.
The Chasm describes the gap or hole that an idea might fall into that prevents it from gaining mass market appeal. The way to cross it is to take the light bulb moment and re-apply it continually over the product life cycle.
Of course, Edison was a master at this. He faced many chasms in his career but he never gave up, even to his dying day. He realized that the invention itself wasn’t enough to ensure success. The systems around it were just as important and he was as tenacious as they come.
Take the electric light bulb. To make it work, you also needed an electrical generator, wires to carry the current and a light switch to turn the light on and off. Edison and his team designed and built each of these themselves from the ground up. Topsy, the elephant, played an unwitting part later in the development process.
His moment of real genius though wasn’t the bulb or even the switch but the Edison screw which is still in use today. This allowed the bulb to be installed and removed without any technical knowledge or any danger if the current was still switched on.
Later innovators came up with the bayonet fixing and, even later still, a bulb that consumes less energy and doesn’t need changing for years.
So as you can see, in the case of the light bulb, the product cycle is already over 100 years old and is likely to last for several hundred more, if we don’t warm the planet up too much by using them.
For example, I am sure a hybrid bioluminescent and nano technology will be introduced in this century to create a myriad of innovative lighting solutions. Ironically, our science gets better when it more closely emulates natural processes that have been in existence for eons.
We would all be very proud if one of our light bulb moments was still in use long after we left this mortal coil. Here’s how to apply light bulb moments to achieving that goal.
Over the product’s life cycle, different types of users get involved with it.
In the first phase you find the Innovators. These are people who love being prime movers and getting into the latest and greatest ‘thing’. They don’t mind paying a small premium for a product and can be quite forgiving if a product has a few rough edges, even after beta testing.
They are often light bulb generators in their own right. They can take your product and use it to their advantage in ways that you hadn’t envisioned. These are people you want on your side as it is by their application and reviews that you move your invention to the next stage.
The light bulb moment you can apply here is to initiate viral marketing campaigns so the Innovators become your unpaid sales team. By marketing their own first mover applications, they get as much, if not more, exposure as do you. It’s a win-win situation.
Once the Innovators have paved the way, the Early Adopters are next in line for your amazing new invention. They are incentivised primarily by wanting to get on to a bandwagon. They are slightly risk averse, however, so they wait to hear how someone else gets on with it first - namely the Innovators.
They are driven by aspiration which is of course a linguistic variant of inspiration. Its etymology implies “to breathe upon” and “to be favourable to, to climb up to, to obtain, to reach”.
The light bulb moments to invoke here are how to get the Innovator community to feed such aspirations of the Early Adopters.
A classic example would be when person A bought product B for price C and made more than C back in money as a result.
This neatly bypasses any price objection. The Early Adopter reasons they can buy it on a credit card and have the debt paid off before the bill is due.
Equally, it may be that the Innovator is simply having more fun, is healthier or more attractive as a result. You can’t have enough case studies where you can demonstrate these benefits.
For example, I invented a widget in the 90’s that allowed TV cameras to synchronize with computer screens to remove flicker. Once the producers cottoned on that this could be done, they wouldn’t hire a TV crew unless they had one of my widgets with them.
The purchasers of my widget were more attractive to producers and, as a result, they got more business.
The proof of the benefits could be seen on many a TV program so I didn’t need to advertise as I was indirectly already on the telly. My sales went up accordingly.
When the camera manufacturers installed the feature as standard a few years later, I was expecting all sales to fall off completely. At that point, it wasn’t now a nice-to-have but an essential. Everyone with an old camera without this feature now had to either buy a new camera or buy my widget which was much cheaper.
I had unwittingly accessed the Late Adopter market and leapt over the Chasm.
What is probably most significant about this is was that I was at the time unfamiliar with this model and had no idea that anything like a chasm existed. As a young fearless 33 year old, the leap happened for me. If I was carrying the fear I may have just toppled in.
To get your product or service into the mass market, you have that small matter of the Chasm to cross. One way to deal with this is not to bother. Many companies use a bit of a sledgehammer approach and just keep innovating niche products with the hope, and some knowledge, that one of them will leap the void into mass market acceptance.
There is nothing wrong with this as a tactic and it’s a fun place to work. Innovators and Early Adopters will also pay a premium for a product so margins can be better too.
For example, modern day publishers are adopting this model as lower cost print on demand means you can speculate on more titles and authors.
If however global domination is your thing, there are two ways to cross the Chasm.
The first is to get someone to do it for you by selling your IP [intellectual property] and partnering with someone who has more global reach and buying power.
You can either sell out completely or negotiate a royalty deal for fewer margins but higher volume. This does mean also you can get on with the next invention.
The second way is to become that company with a global reach which has become much easier with the ubiquity of the Internet.
The Late Adopters are incentivized not so much by the innovation itself but by practicality. They want to know what it can do for them that they couldn’t do before.
The light bulb moments needed here are twofold. To invent as many lateral applications for your invention as you can and then to find as many ways as you can to access the demographic groups who might be interested.
I will group the last two types of customer into one classification as the approach to selling to them is similar. They are just interested in utility and price. They were the last to have a mobile phone and a broadband connection. Often they represent the older end of the population who might be somewhat set in their ways - or just have everything they need. Do not ignore this demographic as it is growing as an overall percentage of the population in the Western World and often has disposable income.
They will be motivated by necessity and low price. Either the old way of doing things is not available any more (like analogue TV) or it’s actually becoming more costly not to adopt a new way of doing things.
The innovation required here is to find ways of making products cheaply in volume. For services, you might want to license or franchise them so more people can deliver your methodology. Again a bigger partner might be a useful ally.
Somewhat ironically, at the end of a product’s life cycle, it can sometimes acquire a rarity value and the Innovators start to buy them again at a premium.
In all these cases, the generation of light bulb moments in a marketing context will be made much easier by use of parallel thinking.
The IDEA acronym can be used in its original form - i.e. Inspiration, Dream, Evaluate, Actualise.
Alternatively, a more practical an approachable description might be something like this:
Each time you extend your market reach, you approach a new sector, introduce your product and work out how best to deliver it.
The fun comes though when you extrapolate how your light bulb moment can be applied and augment the original idea -sometimes in a direction you did not foresee - the Spin Off.
The best thing about spin offs is that they are like having a double light bulb moment. They augment and improve on your original idea. Even better still is that often it’s not you but your Innovators or Early/Late Adopters that come up with them.
You can of course stimulate this process by running focus groups with customers or by interacting with them in online forums.
By far the best way, however, is to use our in built ‘random association computer’ - i.e. our brain - stimulated of course by the best association generator, a Mind Map.
I’ve also used as a seed the acronym IDEA and made up yet more things it can stand for.
Feel free to change these seed words to your own and add more. The task in this crystallization is, either by yourself or in a group, to think of as many ways as you can that your product or service could have spin offs.
To give you some guidance, what I mean by these labels is as follows:
This last point is crucial. At a certain point in your light bulb moment’s journey, you will no longer be able to go it alone. To capitalize on all the spin off potential, you will need to bring in people to help you. The team you assemble is vitally important and can make or break your dream.
You can work to a model that never crosses the Chasm.
To cross the Chasm, you will need help or luck.
Be prepared to change your strategy over the product or service life time.
Capitalize on your asset through the Spin Off.