Technology push and market pull
Technology push and market pull describe the two main sources of innovation: advances seeking an application, and market needs seeking a solution.
Does innovation start with a discovery looking for a use, or a need looking for an answer? Both, and confusing the two is a frequent mistake.
Technology push and market pull describe the two basic sources of innovation. Technology push begins with an advance, a new capability or discovery that then seeks an application. Market pull begins with a recognised customer need or demand that then draws forth a solution. Most innovation involves elements of both, but the starting point shapes the risks.
Two directions of travel
Under technology push, the science or capability comes first and the firm asks what it might be good for. Under market pull, the need comes first and the firm asks how to meet it. Push can produce genuinely novel things customers could never have requested, because they could not imagine them; pull tends to produce things customers clearly want, because they asked. The famous observation that customers would have asked for faster horses captures the limit of pure pull.
The characteristic failure of each
Each source has a signature failure. Technology push risks producing impressive solutions in search of a problem, innovations that work beautifully and sell to no one, because no real need was ever established. Market pull risks producing only incremental answers to needs customers can already articulate, missing the breakthroughs that come from capabilities customers did not know to want. Push can be brilliant and useless; pull can be useful and unambitious.
Holding both together
The strongest innovation usually marries the two: a new capability matched to a real need, technology looking for problems and problems looking for technology, meeting in the middle. The practical discipline is to know which mode you are in and to supply the missing half, grounding a push innovation in a genuine need, or stretching a pull innovation with capabilities the customer has not imagined.
The distinction guards against two opposite delusions: that good technology sells itself, and that listening to customers is enough. Innovation that lasts generally needs both a real capability and a real need, and the art is in connecting them.