Can you hear me now? A “Seeing Around Corners” early warning materializes

When a sector has hostages, not customers, big problems go un-addressed, people are desperate for help and don’t get it, and a near-monopoly provider community fails to listen, the stage is set for a major inflection point. This is the story of the hearing aid business….until now.

In my book, Seeing Around Corners: How To Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, I anticipated that the business of hearing aids was in for a major disruption, an inflection point if you will. Here’s what I said in 2019:

“Imagine a sector that effectively serves only 1 in 5 potential customers. Now, imagine a massive change that would allow competitors to capture all that unmet demand, in a highly profitable way, and without taking on a lot of risk. Imagine that the sector, as it is, generates about $8 Billion in revenue annually. The post-inflection point sector could be 5 times that size, meaning that some $45 billion or so in revenue could potentially be unlocked for those competitors adroit enough and far-sighted enough to be at the right place when the inflection point does its work.

Though they are often depicted as disruptive destroyers of existing businesses, inflection points create vast new venues even as they destroy outdated technologies and models…