---
id: "claim-found-time-drives-exploration"
type: "claim"
source_timestamps: ["¶2", "¶4"]
tags: ["empirical-finding", "marketing-effectiveness", "adoption-triggers"]
related: ["concept-found-time", "contrarian-hype-does-not-equal-readiness", "entity-blockchain"]
confidence: "high"
testable: true
speakers: ["Guneet Kaur Nagpal", "Amrita Mitra"]
sources: ["commercial"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-commercial"
originDay: 5
articleStem: "hbr-foci-66-customers-willing-try-new-tech"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/11/research-when-are-customers-willing-to-try-a-new-technology"
sourceTitle: "Research: When Are Customers Willing to Try a New Technology?"
---
# Found time drives exploration more than publicity spikes

**Claim:** A genuine, unexpected gain in free time nudges people to explore complex, hard-to-grasp ideas *significantly more* than any spike in publicity or marketing buzz (see [[concept-found-time]] and [[contrarian-hype-does-not-equal-readiness]]).

**Evidence — the natural experiment:** During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, [[entity-guneet-kaur-nagpal|Nagpal]] and [[entity-amrita-mitra|Mitra]] analyzed search behavior across **118 counties in California and New York**. As out-of-home obligations dropped and leisure time rose, searches for [[entity-blockchain|blockchain]]-related terms increased in direct correlation with people staying home. Searching is framed as a *low-risk first move* — 'searches aren't adoption, but they're a low-risk first move' — signalling curiosity turning into action, driven by time rather than marketing.

**Confidence: high** (internal to the authors' analysis). **Testable: yes.**

**Enrichment / validation status:** No public, citable article by these authors on this specific 118-county blockchain analysis could be located — it may be a forthcoming journal article, a working paper, or proprietary analysis. The *direction* (time gains → more exploratory online behavior) is consistent with time-scarcity and *gained-time* literature, but the **specific blockchain–Covid natural experiment should be treated as plausible but not yet externally validated.**