Is Innovation the Key to Succeed in Tech or Is It Just Copy & Hype?

I dare not draw any conclusion, either, for I believe technology changes not only the product but also how businesses operate (which is an idea not different from Douglass North's) — seeing how much the rate of change in tech has itself been increasing, it'd be imprudent to say anything definitive.

But today, at least today, we appear to be living in a world of hype, aided and abetted by the rise of social media: the explosion of video reviews, the bombardments of "shares" in such reviews, advertisements, and personal opinions (like this one), and confounding inclination in "following" celebrities of gazillions of varieties. From the consumer's perspective, there's little difference who the innovator is. A "copier" that copies and repackages well may in fact provide the most refined experience. A couple of such refinements may be hyped to outshine the fundamental innovation underpinning the products with little investment, such as providing media units for review and for celebrities to pose with, and organization interactive campaigns on Facebook or Twitter. Traditional media in turn pick up these hypes, and we have a positive feedback loop in place.

This demand-side economy is a bit different from the supply-side economy in innovation: In the years gone by, for example, search engines have revolutionized how we access information, and they have done extremely well in turn in force-feeding us information and profiting in the process. So it is with social media. In this supply-side innovation, innovators provide technologies that we need but didn't know that we do, whereas in demand-side innovation, businesses create hypes of what we want that we perhaps do not. In this switch of paradigms, companies that used to be supply-side innovators have become demand-side marketers.

This is all well and good, but sooner rather than later another supply-side innovator will appear, and no amount of good marketing will supplement need for want.