The 4 Stages to Technology Adoption Inside the Chasm

“From great bitterness comes a great awakening”

In the world of disruptive high tech medical devices, Geoffrey A. Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” is the playbook by which you learn to secure a niche and use it to leverage into the mainstream market.

The greatest medical device executives will tell you war stories of taking their technology to market, fighting tooth and nail for supremacy, and what it takes to stay on top.

It all starts at the chasm.

Outlining the technology adoption lifecycle, Moore shows that customers sit at various places at various times. When you get to a tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, the system tips and you get mass-market acceptance of an idea.

This is known as “Crossing the Chasm”, and in a company’s journey, it receives little attention once the excitement of mass-market adoption overshadows it.

There’s also the fact that most successful companies get through as fast as possible. To be clear, the chasm is a very bad, nasty place to be.

It promises few, if any, new customers. What it does house are all sorts of unpleasant types of people, from disenchanted current customers to nasty competitors and unsavory investors.