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Issue 1 - May 13, 2009

Shifting an Invention into an Innovation: a Staged Approach

by Philippe Davidson

When a new technology requires users to acquire new skills, there is usually significant inertia to its adoption.  The extent to which the QWERTY keyboard continues to be used despite more efficient alternatives is a textbook example of this phenomenon.  Emerging technology marketers faced with this challenge often choose to focus on a niche market and to identify a few lead customers with sophisticated and high-volume requirements, rather than targeting the mainstream market immediately.  In addition, when one industry player adopts a new technology, its competitors will often follow suit to avoid allowing the company that is the first to adopt to develop a competitive advantage over them. 

Let’s consider a contemporary example. When the Segway  (www.segway.com) was introduced, it was an invention that was widely heralded as having huge upside potential. It promoted a vision of the world in which people perched onto them would be zipping along sidewalks in towns and cities effortlessly and at greater speeds than our innate pedestrian mode of locomotion.  Unfortunately, years later, people still prefer by far their natural two-legged walking, and a person on a Segway is still widely viewed as an oddity.  Other than getting used to the idea, using a Segway requires new skills that consumers need to develop. Hence, the mainstream vision and market penetration strategy clearly hasn’t worked.  The principles of selecting a niche market, power users and target industries in which the players are sensitive to one another’s operating costs for the competitive advantage considerations that I mentioned above could be applied to the Segway . Let’s imagine that the Segway would first be offered to large industrial or institutional organizations for the purpose of speeding up the movements of their staff within the confines of their properties.  When the advantages of its use are proposed and promoted by an employer, it is very likely that staff members will apply themselves to develop the required skills and to use it.  Once these skills have been acquired, they will likely and naturally move onto the mainstream consumer market as these staff members use them in their daily lives.

Large organizations may be spread over wide areas of land or floor space.  An organization could procure a fleet of Segways to make them available to its staff at large; no need to assign them to specific individuals. They would be scattered across the property, available for any staff member in their vicinity.  Once a Segway and its user would have arrived at the given location, the Segway would be left in a public area for any other staff member who happens to be passing by.  To recharge the Segways, the facilities cleaning staff would be instructed to plug them into the closest electrical outlet in the evenings.  A little basket would be attached to the handle in which one could place one’s notebooks, files or other objects to ensure that both hands are free for safe operation. 

Let’s make the idea even more sophisticated: if a Segway gets left in a place where there is low circulation and low probability that it would find a new user, on-board GPS-enabled intelligence would make it roll back by itself to an area with more circulation. Employees could program the time at which they need one again directly on the on-board controller of the Segway that brought them to a given location, by sending an SMS with the mobile phone, or on a web site.  With this programming, the Segway would either stay on location, find its way to the location where the need would have been programmed or forward the request to another Segway in nearest the vicinity if it is in the process of servicing another employee at the scheduled time. There would be only a few simple rules such as not being allowed to bring them off the company property nor onto the parking lots at the end of the day to avoid them being abandoned there creating a driving hazard similar to the one that we experience with shopping carts at the supermarket and that requires additional staff in order to round them up.  Imagine the benefits that this idea could bring to organizations using facilities such as large warehouse and shipping operations that are spread over large areas to service many truck loading and unloading bays.  In such facilities, employees regularly walk the equivalent of 15 miles per day; the gains in productivity and reductions in employee fatigue would be enormous.

An innovation can also break the inertia of the market when a government promotes its use.  This could occur for the Segway by scaling up the approach described above. Municipalities could buy fleets of Segways for general public use throughout their municipal boundaries.  One would swipe one’s credit card to rent one that would have its “Available” sign on. From that point onwards, the Segway would serve this user exclusively even when it is parked and left unattended outside the entrance of a store or a restaurant.  It would remain reserved until the renter’s card is re-swipped or a code is entered to release it for another person to use.  Multiple parking areas, that is to say a complementary asset, would need to be installed throughout the city to allow the users to return them to a convenient location close to where they are going.  This requirement makes it harder than the corporate fleet scenario described above, because it converts this individual innovation into a “system innovation” on which several stake-holders have to sign up simultaneously to make it viable.  Picture them being used on popular street malls, such as the Denver 16th Street Mall, Boulder, Colorado’s Pearl Street Mall, Brisbane, Australia’s Queen Street Mall, or Ottawa, Canada’s Sparks Street Mall for example.  In addition, the Segways could allow the physically challenged, but not wheelchair bound, to enjoy the malls and to shop with more ease, and, as a result, improving their quality of life while increasing the street mall retailers’ business.

Everything mentioned herein about the Segway could apply to any other new yet undiscovered technology in this new product category and more widely to other innovations.

Philippe Davidson
Innovation Strategist
philippe_davidson@hotmail.com

(Find Philippe on LinkedIn)  

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