I’ve noticed there are industries with “innovation fatigue.” Social media has been this way, with the rate of change going faster than people can absorb. 

It wears people out.

The interesting part is that this rate of fatigue is different for each person and situation. I’ve been a tech geek for over five decades, so I tend to enjoy these innovations more than most people do.

But even I stopped looking for the ultimate word processor 25 years ago. I stopped investing in the latest and greatest laptops a bit later.

Now I’m quite satisfied with “good enough” in many areas. But even this week I’ve been playing around with new audio and video tools that are pretty cool.

What’s happening here? Well, absorbing innovation takes time and energy. You have to learn new ways of doing things and change whatever methods you’d been using before. You worry about whether this really WILL be any improvement.

It can even be as simple as learning the buttons on a new dishwasher and figuring out how to load it differently.

The challenge for us as innovators is this: Who will find our innovations so compelling that it’s worth investing time, energy, money, and even take some risks to absorb them? It’s a complicated question to answer, and the only way you’ll know for sure is to test it with Real People. Preferably paying money so that gets factored in as well.

Those of us producing the innovation have already gotten over the learning curve. And, hey, we like this change more than most others do – that’s why we created it.

Most everyone else is pretty tired of our so-called innovations. They have a life and aren’t thrilled to change.

But there are a few who really really want it. They’re the initial market and potential champions for spreading it further.

It’s so much fun to find those people! But remember that there are probably not enough of them to make a sustainable business. We need to create a path to those who are worn out with innovation.

And that fatigue is a major force in most every industry I see. Even ones we think are “totally new.”

This article was first published on InnovatioNews.