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I am often asked my opinion on the difference between entrepreneurship and innovation. For me, it’s not semantic. Simply put, my belief is:

• Innovation is about invention.
• Entrepreneurship is about commercialisation.

There is a huge difference. Equally, there is a huge area of overlap and intersection.

I’ve also been asked whether I regard myself as either an ‘innovator’ or an ‘entrepreneur’. I have never thought of myself as either.

My first career – my early passion – was marketing. I’ve always seen myself as an agent for mass adoption.

My passion is the mass adoption of new technologies that deliver a positive impact to people, businesses, and the planet. What’s exciting is, I’m not alone.

During my career as a marketeer in the UK, I’m proud to have contributed to the mass-adoption of products and services a few times over, across a spectrum of brands, businesses, and ventures – I’ll write about those examples as case-studies when I translate these blog posts into a book (which I’ll start compiling later this year).

The term ‘mass-adoption’ is a relative term. What I mean by it is, to reach the maximum audience relevant to your product/service/sector/ambition. Some products are universally relevant – others are niche.

That last point, ambition, is perhaps the most important. If you are a fitness instructor, it is perfectly fine, acceptable, applaudable [even] to only want to recruit X number of customers. You don’t have to be as prolific and globally successful as Joe Wicks who serves hundreds of thousands of customers internationally, (Joe is one of the most talented entrepreneurs that I’ve ever had the privilege to meet).

My previous post captured my assertion that “Build it and they won’t come ” – an appeal for innovators and entrepreneurs to avoid the illusion (delusion) that simply creating a product will manifest demand.

Inconveniently, building demand is invariably more difficult than building product. In venturing I’m keen for the application of effort to be more correlated to those challenges proportionately - for entrepreneurs to prioritise ‘demand-development’ over ‘product-development’. In my experience, success [and survival] depends on it – and that’s why I am so passionate about this topic.

Regarding mass-adoption - the problem is that rational logic does not work. We all know we should eat well, drink more water, and exercise more often. And yet, very few of us do.

The following examples are imperfect, but, if rational logic prevailed then the consumption of organic food should be much higher; we’d cumulatively eat less meat; and adoption of electric vehicles would be faster.

I am aware of two scientific studies that explore the failure of rational logic to affect positive changes in consumer behaviour. Propositions such as Saving Time; Saving Money; Saving the Planet – have very little (if any) impact, no matter how well they are communicated. What the research concluded is that when uptake is dependent on behavioural change, the most powerful proposition that affects and accelerates adoption is evidencing to people that their peers are already doing it, [‘it’ being whatever the proposition happens to be].

I especially like the research study exploring how best to encourage domestic recycling, where communication leaflets that tested a variety of messages, (eg. saving the planet; saving money etc etc) failed to generate much of a response. But what did affect change was not only “this is what everyone else is doing” but specifically, placing the recycling containers on the pavement outside participants’ houses thereby broadcasting participation and conformity. There are other equivalent academic studies – one recently about switching off air-conditioning to save the planet; save money etc. which evidenced the same outcomes/findings.

No-one wants to be the one letting the side down. No-one wants to be humiliated – and not doing what others do represents a risk of leaving oneself open to criticism, possibly ridicule. Fear is a powerful motivator.

My assertion is that there is a positive force that is significantly more powerful than fear – and that is: the human compulsion to conform.

Humans are hardwired to mimic, to conform, to blend-in, to commune. This compulsion is hardwired in our NDA, in our genetics, our traditions, and our culture. It is involuntary, automatic, and subconscious. It is tribal, protectionist, and survivalist.

I believe that conformity is an animal instinct, and it is why humans have regional accents and local dialects – the purpose of which is not only to ‘belong’ it is also to disarm, to pacify, to unite, to literally broadcast: ‘I am one of you – I am like you – I am part of your community – I will preserve and contribute to our community’.

Mass adoption is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. Comments such as “a million people can’t be wrong” is a legitimate rationale – it’s about trust. But my assertion is that whilst trust is important, trust is not contagious. My belief is that fundamentally, humans like to do what other humans do – and when leveraged entrepreneurially, conformity is highly infectious and especially viral.

Successful entrepreneurs have a talent for creating movements and creating momentum.

The repeat behaviour common to successful entrepreneurs is that they create the perception that ‘every-one-is-doing-it’ even before their product is fully available.

And that is why social media is so important. The practical application of social media is that the more remarkable you make your product, the more people will be compelled to remark upon it to their friends and family. Word-of-mouth was always the most powerful form of marketing. What social media provides is the opportunity to amplify and broadcast advocacy thereby multiplying its power exponentially. Social media is a tool that small businesses can leverage to their advantage, disproportionately.

Practical steps that innovators and entrepreneurs can take to affect mass-adoption – not an exhaustive list, but simply a handful of examples to help bring the opportunity to life:

MVP / Beta: Get your product in peoples’ hands. Make your MVP digital – don’t just get ‘units’ into users’ hands, get those units producing data. Publish the insights and findings generated by that data.

Advocacy: Get notable people to advocate your product and provide testimonies. ‘Notable’ can be either:

• Celebrities
• Industry experts
• Unremarkable people that look and sound just like your everyday users

Network: Engage existing customer interest groups: fanbases; forums; user-groups; charities; associations; trade-bodies – give them something to talk about – give them something that they are compelled to share with their members / peers.

Corporates: Which corporates provide a fast-track to millions of people that you want to reach? What would compel those corporates to engage with you; to support you; to advocate your product/service? How can you contact directly the ‘Director of Innovation’ in those corporates specifically?

Build Communities: The Most Powerful Action: if there is an absence of any consumer group connected to your cause / mission / purpose / ambition – what can you do to create and convene one and become a force for change in that space? Even if your product is B2B, what is the ultimate consumer group that has a vested interest in the success of your venture and is aligned with its purpose?

Vitally – how can you do all the above simultaneously?

To reiterate my previous recommendations:

• Don’t pursue business development consecutively. Pursue interventions that drive mass adoption concurrently.
• Plan for success. Don’t wait to discover how an initiative turns-out. Ask yourself, what will you do if it works well? Do that now.
• Don’t focus on the money. Initial volumes are likely to be small and therefore the economics will be challenging. Investors are compelled by potential, not by the current metrics. Short-term revenue is invariably a red-herring. Instead of focusing on short-term revenue, focus instead on the identification of pathways to mass-adoption.
• Evidence the potential. Evidence demand.