U.K. Innovation Rates Accelerate

One easy observation one might make about the latest report from Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, is that the pace of innovation is increasing in the U.K. part of the communications industry.

That has been true in virtually every market over the past couple of decades as well, but the latest U.K. data illustrates the solidity of the trend.

As recently as a few decades ago, a new communications service might have taken 10 years to reach penetration of about 50 percent of households in a market. Read more here.

In the United Kingdom, both mobile phones and multichannel television both took more than a decade to reach 50 percentration, for example. In the last decade, popular and important innovations such as social networks and online TV reached 50 percent penetration within four to five years.

Analysts expect smartphones to reach the same landmark equally quickly as well. Rates of change that fast are hard for larger enterprises of all sorts to cope with, which helps explain why most innovation (not all) comes from smaller firms.

The big recent exception is the impact Apple has had in the mobile markets. In that case, it took a well-heeled, substantial firm to force a big and disruptive market change.

Read more here.