Pro-Innovation Bias
We overvalue innovations and fail to appreciate their limitations and downsides.
Pro-innovation bias is the tendency to have an excessive optimism toward new inventions or innovations, overvaluing their usefulness and undervaluing their limitations and downsides. This leads to rapid adoption without adequate risk assessment, and to under-investment in improving existing systems. It was coined by Everett Rogers in diffusion of innovations research.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Technology New Feature Rush A company rushes to deploy an AI customer service system without adequate testing because leadership is excited by the technology, underestimating failure modes that alienate customers.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
The airline introduces a new boarding process using digital passes, believing it will speed up boarding, but it causes confusion because passengers are unfamiliar with the technology.
A hospital administrator invests in a state-of-the-art robotic surgery system, sure it will reduce all errors, without a plan for the extensive surgeon training or the fact that some procedures are safer done manually.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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