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Key Takeaways Most innovation happens in three stages: visibility, interface and incentives.
The reason this framework is worth paying attention to is that attention in technology markets usually arrives long before the bigger changes take place.
If you want to reshape your industry, spot these signs and go after the incentives underneath them.
Every few years, some new technology comes along promising to upend an entire industry. The early coverage is breathless. Investors pile in. Founders talk about making things faster, cheaper and more transparent. For a while, it really does feel like the ground is shifting under your feet.
Then something strange tends to happen.
The technology keeps getting better, but the industry itself doesn’t look all that different. Tools improve. Interfaces get smoother. Data moves faster. Yet for most people, the actual experience of participating in that industry barely changes. That’s when the tone shifts. The same innovation that looked revolutionary a few years earlier gets written off as hype.
Proptech is a textbook case of this.
Real estate technology has attracted enormous attention and capital for the better part of a decade. New platforms promised to modernize buying and selling homes via better data, more automation, digital workflows, and more. And honestly, a lot of useful things got built. You can browse listings instantly now, pull historical sales data, compare neighborhoods, get automated price estimates in seconds. None of that existed at any real scale twenty years ago.
But ask someone who recently bought or sold a home whether the experience itself feels fundamentally different, and you’ll usually get some version of “not really.”
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