
26 • e CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions
The S-Curve and Innovation Management
e S-curve, a quantitative trend-extrapolation technique used in fore-
casting, has long been used in the technology industry. Many argue that
this analysis is actually more useful to see where you’ve been rather than
where you should go (Spencer 2005). e S-curve is most oen used to
compare two competitive products in two dimensions: usually time and
performance, as shown in Figure1.3.
An excellent example of an S-curve can be found in Alexander (2001), in
his discussion of the product innovation cycle. He discusses the S-curve of
the ubiquitous auto