Did Covid-19 Change Martec's Law?

There is wide agreement that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused many technology adoption curves to get a temporary bump up in adoption, with growth then continuing on the curve already in place before the pandemic and its organizational response.  That is illustrated by the impact of the “cataclysmic event” on an underlying rate of organizational change. 

source: chiefmartec

In other words, firms and organizations are said to have experienced “a year’s worth of change in a month.” 

Martec’s Law was coined in 2013 by Scott Brinker, Hubspot VP. Martec’s Law states that technology changes linearly, while technological change is non-linear. That observation has parallels in the notion of the productivity paradox. 

The productivity paradox suggests that information technology or communications investments do not always immediately translate into effective productivity results. Many note that measured productivity has declined since 2000, despite all the technology investments firms have made. 

source: Goldman Sachs

This productivity paradox was apparent for much of the 1980s and 1990s, when one might have struggled to identify clear evidence of productivity gains from a rather massive investment in information technology.

Some would say the uncertainty covers a wider span of time, dating back to the 1970s and including even the “Internet” years from 2000 to the present.

The point is that it has in the past taken as long as 15 years for technology investments to produce measurable gains. 

Computing power in the U.S. economy increased by more than two orders of magnitude between 1970 and 1990, for example, yet productivity, especially in the service sector, stagnated).

And though it seems counter-intuitive, even the Internet has not clearly affected economy-wide productivity. Some might argue that is because we are not measuring properly. It is hard to assign a value to activities that have no incremental cost, such as listening to a streamed song instead of buying a compact disc. It might also be argued that benefits accrue, but only over longer periods of time. 

source: Customer Think

Few, if any, buyers of new technology actually believe the claims of benefit advanced by suppliers, for good reason. Virtually all observers of technology adoption note that organizations benefit from new technology at a rate that is vastly less than the rate of adoption. That’s the essence of Martec’s Law, which holds even if the Covid-19 pandemic caused an unusual step change in behavior.