Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore hit a home run with his book, Crossing the Chasm, some years ago.  That book described the yawning gulf--a a chasm--between Early Adopters of a new idea/concept/product and the Skeptical Majority who have to be persuaded in order that any new thing be widely adopted.

It so perfectly described the problem for many Silicon Valley start-ups who sold their neat whiz bang to their friends but could not scale thereafter.  The book, and the concept, was widely endorsed.

In a more recent book, Dealing with Darwin, Moore describes what happens later--once the product scales, the company has trouble with the encore.  We've all seen this--companies become so wedded to their cool moneymaker that they overstay the situation, and when the profits erode, it's hard to climb back into innovation time.

Some--Gifford Pinchot notably-- argue for Intrapreneuring Innovation (THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG, right?)--as the way to overcome that unhappy circumstance.   And actually, that is my thesis as well.  But I lately have been doing this with some diagrams, built on top of Moore's later book.

I claim that their are FIVE CHASMS, not ONE.

ONE--the MARKETING CHASM--is what Moore describes.  It is an EXTERNAL Chasm, meaning that it is centered with the erstwhile customer base, which must be motivated to change behavior.

The next THREE are INTERNAL Chasms, structurally determined by "the company itself," amenable to change only from WITHIN the corporation.  I'll enumerate those in the next blog post

The last of the five, is a PERSONAL Chasm, which describes for AN INDIVIDUAL just why it is so hard to "THINK OUT OF THE BOX" once you've gotten good within a box.  It's related, I think, to why it is so hard to teach old dogs new tricks, but it is much more a function of the discomfort and difficulty to give up cherished beliefs and skills and embrace the unknown.

I will call these, respectively, the:

MARKETING CHASM

FUNDING CHASM

EXPERTISE CHASM

CANNIBALISM CHASM

"OUT OF THE BOX" CHASM

We'll outline those in subsequent posts