Challenges Facing S-Curve Analysis

S-Curve analysis is an incredible tool for determining which strategy a company should use when developing new products or determining which types of innovation are required to make your products competitive. Although in a changing world the S-Curve is facing new challenges that it lacks the capabilities to accommodate.


The challenge comes when it is not a product that you are focusing on but a service or business model. How does one determine where exactly their service or business model is on the curve? We know that knowing where your product resides is key to understanding the strategy that should be taken but with services and business models the challenge is determining where they reside. If the service is an internal service that makes it much more challenging because you lack competition as a comparison.

One key concept required to understand where your product or service resides along the S-Curve is the level of competition if you are not able to determine this factor a accurately determining the position will be far to challenging and subjective. In cases such as this I must say that S-Curve analysis will hardly be sufficient to determine proper strategies moving forward and could lead to implementing the wrong strategy. My best suggestion is to leave S-Curve analysis for product development and use other models when trying to understand innovation of business models or services.

This is important because the innovation of services and competitive business models is a fairly new field and will require the development of models that are aimed at servicing these types of innovations.