Geoffrey Moore

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Geoffrey Moore bigraphy, stories - Speakers

Geoffrey Moore : biography

31 July 1946 –

Geoffrey Moore is a Silicon Valley–based high-technology consultant, venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures and author. He heads his own consulting firm, Geoffrey Moore Consultinghttp://www.geoffreyamoore.com/bio-geoffrey-moore/

His books are derived from his Silicon Valley consulting work at The McKenna Group and the Chasm Group (which he founded), and earlier work by Everett Rogers on adopter categories and diffusion of innovations.

Books

  • Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-tech Products to Mainstream Customers (1991, revised 1999) – ISBN 0-06-051712-3
  • Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge (1995) revised as Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets (2004) – ISBN 0-88730-824-4
  • The Gorilla Game: An Investor’s Guide to Picking Winners in High Technology (with Paul Johnson and Tom Kippola, 1998) revised as The Gorilla Game : Picking Winners in High Technology (1999)
  • Living on the Fault Line : Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet (2000), revised as Living on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy (2002)
  • : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution (2005)
  • Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past (2011)http://www.escapevelocitybymoore.com ISBN 978-0-06-204089-3

Paradigms

Contributions to the technology adoption life cycle and the high tech marketing model

One of Moore’s key insights is that as one progresses through the technology adoption life cycle used as a model for high tech marketing, there is a credibility gap that occurs in trying to move on through the adoption segments outlined below.

His major contribution in the field is the ‘chasm’ that separates the early market and early adopter visionaries from the early pragmatists when confronted with discontinuous innovations. The various groups or segments or profiles adopt innovations in stages based on their unique psycho-graphic profiles (a combination of psychological, demographic, and social attributes).

Moore defines the early market as being made up of technology enthusiasts and innovators who are looking for state of the art technology and try innovations out just to see if they will work. These lone technical inventors usually don’t have any buying influence in organizations so must be seeded with products so they may be used as references for the next profile in the early market.

That would be the visionary early adopters who are change agents looking for an order of magnitude improvement or fundamental breakthrough or quantum leap in competitive advantage in the way business is conducted.

The next segment in the technology adoption life cycle are the early pragmatists who do not trust visionaries as a reference base, and act like herd animals in the adoption of innovations, so are very reference or support oriented. So this creates a catch-22 since the only references that an early pragmatists will use is another pragmatists that is in their industry.

"The chasm is a drastic lull in market development that occurs after the visionary market is saturated and pragmatists will not buy into a discontinuous technology unless they can reference other pragmatists, thus the catch-22. Pragmatists dependent exclusively on references from others in their own industry and are highly support oriented."

Moore uses a metaphorical bowling alley where one targets vertical industry market segments with broken mission critical business processes in order to penetrate this low risk product. If a popular app is found while these pragmatist are adopting as pins in a bowling alley a tornado of demand may develop where late pragmatists adopt en masses.

If enough of the technical complexity is designed out of the product the next adoption group, the conservatives on main street may adopt if they trust in a pragmatist reference base.