The Challenge For Innovators Is To Accelerate The Adoption Process

By Mark Blackwell, Lending & Surveying Services Director at eTech Solutions

Mortgage Finance Gazette, March 2017

In Crossing The Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore writes about the Technology Adoption Lifecycle. Innovators are followed by early adopters who are joined by the early and late majority respectively and eventually the laggards complete the process. Historically there is a great chasm between the early adopters and the early majority.

The challenge for innovators is to narrow this chasm and accelerate adoption across all parties. The importance of this process highlights the critical nature of partnerships as much as much as it does the relevance of any technology in a given market.

There is a resurgent mood in the survey and valuation marketplace with some free thinking commercial leadership steering businesses through 2017 and beyond. This is a competitive technological landscape, not something you would have often heard until now.

There exists a palpable appetite for change in both lending and surveying circles that yearns for stable operating environments and cutting edge property risk management services to support the property underwriting processes.

This combined appetite and mood drives greater collaboration, fresh thinking with new technology platforms and applications, challenging of ideas and proving of concepts that in turn enrich the value of survey and valuation businesses in the eyes of lenders.

Yes, times are indeed changing, but so also are surveying businesses who are jumping that chasm and embracing the change toward modern methods of property assessment. After all, lenders may want to automate certain processes but will still want trained resources to deliver that service.

The scene is set for new IT platforms and mobile technologies to underpin this new thinking laid out by lenders who want to flex their security assessment options. The good news is that many likeminded firms are ready to take on that challenge to turn it into an opportunity.

Working closely with surveying organisations to deliver this change and close the gap between different stages of adoption of new technology remains both a pleasure and a revelation.

Read the full publication here