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Today is another of those times we gonna have fun. Sorry about that, it’s not the grant way school should be, but what can I do.
Um… Last time, we talked about users innovating. This time we’re going talk about a method related to user innovation, ok? It’s called the lead user method. Now, um… see here. Now you remember last time I mentioned to you that the methods we are talking about in this course can be distinguished by saying, in a sense what users do you talk to, and what information do you get from them, ok? Traditional methods as I mentioned to you, would be some of the ones we talked about like traditional marketing research that goes to target market users and then asks them “What do you think you want?” Doesn’t really ask them for solutions because as we will see, they typically don’t have solutions. Lead user methods go to the leading edge of the market curve, and what they do is they find out both what the leading edge users need, cause the needs are emerging there, but also how they’ve solve them, ok? So you saw last time in that video “Dog Tennessee Boys”, you saw a bunch of users developing their own innovations as you may recall that. Corrine, can you turn off that light, please? Um… isn’t that good to have a TA? Thank you TA! Life is so good!
Uh…ok… Now, you remember the definitions, an innovation is anything new that is actually used (“enters the marketplace”) – whether major or minor, that’s what we are talking about here. Do you remember that many industrial and consumers products have roots in user innovation. This has been something that’s not been traditionally studied and is hard to find out information about, but when you study it you’ll find out that many many innovations actually come from users. These examples here are simply the ones we discussed last time in the case of consumer product examples.
Now here is where we get to lead users. To say that users innovate does not really mean that manufacturers care. Let’s imagine that each user creates something only good for themselves, in that case, why would manufacturer care? Manufacturer wants to sale to many users, right? So, users innovate, for this reasons down here, they “expect high benefit from a solution to they needs.” You remember the police car image that I show you last time where people are creating their own solution for air filters around St. Helens? Cause they sure won’t expect the manufacturers to do it for them. And they have a very high need.
Now, what does a manufacturer want? A manufacturer wants users that have additional attribute, not only do they innovate but they foreshadow general demand. They had needs that others will have as well, ok? If you can find somebody like that, then what you do is you say “Ha! Their solution information and need information might well be useful to me”, right?
Ok, now uh… what you have here then is this curve, isn’t this the worst slide you ever saw? I thought you’d be impressed… What you have here is this curve, and it’s a diffusion curve, and if you look at it, what you’ll see is that it’s really talking about people who needs something new, is the vertical lexis here. Now, what happen in this course is the supply follows demand, and somebody makes for you what you want. But there is this early period, where basically somebody needs it before manufacture is caught on, that it is needed, and there is a market. So really what you have to do in that case, there are no commercial solutions available and you have to do it yourself. Ok? So, now if you compare this to, uh… where it go, if you compare this to an adopter curve, this is Ever Roger’s adopter curve, and basically what he did was he took a distribution and he took standard deviations, and couples deviations out. He called very early adopters innovators, which creates all sorts of confusion as you can imagine. Because in a sense I guess they are innovating in adoption, but there are something to adopt. In the case of diffusion curve, the diffusion curve is about adoption, adopter categorization. So they are very first people to adopt hybrid-corn or something like that in the diffusion literature they called innovators, but really what we are talking about is people who are outside of that, there is nothing there to adopt yet, ok? So when you are looking for people who are lead user innovators, you are not necessary looking for your early customers, who are adopting something that you already have in fact you are not. You are looking for somebody who’s a user struggling for a solution. I show you last time as an example of Tim Burners Lee’s world wide web. It’s a great example of lead user innovation. He did it for himself. He didn’t really… he wasn’t trying to sell it, so he didn’t really focus on whether thousands or millions of other would need it, what he focused on was “do I need it?” And it began to spread, and it became evident that it was something that people in general would want.
Now, let me tell you what happen then, so I had this curve, this is sort of a, where I was about five years ago, and at this matter when I have this curve and I thought the users innovative and I thought lead users would be the one manufacturers wanted. And, so company started to come to me and they said “so how do you do it?” I said, “uh… well, read the article.” So that felted out most of the people. And… but a couple read the article and they said “Gee you got four paragraphs in there about how to do it, and it looks very much like the first paragraph says start, the middle two said keep on going, and the last one says stop!” Surely there is more to it than this. So what happened was Mary Sonic, who’s somebody from 3M who were searching for breakthrough innovations at 3M, came and spend a year here. And what we did, was we developed the process to systematize finding lead users and bringing them into companies.
So what I’m gonna show you now, I guess um…. I’ll give you a couple of points here, but what I’m gonna show you in just a minute is a video tape that um… in 10 minutes sort of shows you a process and the example as well, and then what we will do on that is build in discussion to explain how this works and so on. So you get a feeling of this technique. Now why do you want to know? Because what we have in this course is a serious of techniques that we try to position in terms of what they do and what they are value to you might be. And why do you care about that? As I told you earlier, systematic innovation in the terms of incremental innovation is well understood, but breakthrough innovation is not. And what you will see when we get to the data is in fact lead users are where breakthrough innovations come from on the functionally novel side.
So just to give you a feeling for this, now, this was the first actual study we did. This thing here is a predict circuit board, a very cool small one, and what are, these, these things here are the um… like that’s an integrated circuit, these are the things you plug into your computer, and um… basically these lines are the wires that connected the stuffs together. Now, there is a software package, called PCCAD, that lay this thing out, they’re so big and complicated people don’t lay them out by hand. And companies weren’t developing these, and what we saw was that users were developing them. Ok? It’s not the company supplying you with these innovations, it was the users. Now I just want to show you how strong this data is. What you see over here is um… is basically what we’ve done is we’ve take these two characteristics of the lead user, and we’ve implemented them in terms of actual sort of concrete data. So here is a bunch of people using PCCAD, ok? These are companies not people this is… you know um… computer companies, people like them. Hum…Computer companies and people like that I should say. And here is at the front of the trend, ok? Now you are at the front of the trend with the expect of particular trend, it’s not all trends in the world, it’s head with expect to something. You were lead user with expect to something important in your marketplace, ok? So here, what was going on with PCCAD was people were always trying to make boards denser, smaller, more compact, more complex, so the strong trend decided the industry was density. And so what we wanted to do was to see what was going on with expect of the density trend. So when you go to the front end of the density trend, and you actually measure in terms of numbers of layers on the board and one line width and so on, what you find out is that you can do a cross analysis and you can end with lead users and routine users, and lead users are the ones who do it, you know who are at higher layers in density, they are higher in the trend. And also these same people, if you ask them things like, these are all samples of bunch of questions, things like “due to high need for improvement system, are you satisfied?” What you find is some said no and some said yes, and ones who are sort of at the head of the trend generally tend to be sort of saying no, but the fascinating things here is the strength of this find. Look at this thing, 80% of these people, who are the leading edge, are not satisfied, they are always, this is trend, you are moving ahead, they are not satisfied and they are innovating. People in the middle, they are ok, they say, “Yeah, what I’ve got is ok,” and very few of those people are innovating. So we have something really quite fascinating here.
If you go back… to this thing, what you see is that you have innovators over here, at the lead user end so that you can pick up both needs and solution information. There is something going on there. And if you can trace that asking these routine users what they want, they will not typically have experimented, ok. So, if you can look at this line you’ll say “ok ahead with expect to what?” In the case of study of PCCAD, it was ahead with expects to density. High need, and if you do that, you get innovation. So, there is something there to pick up.
Now, uh…it’s also true in other areas, but let me stop this one and… Corrine, can you… um… let’s see… yeah, this one… Ok, so we gonna run, we gonna run this tape now this 10 minute tape, sort of describing the practical methodology to find these people. Then I’ll elaborate on it.
(http://www.leaduser.com/training_materials.html)
Now let’s build on that a little bit, and um… try to see how it works.
Ok, now, here we have this curve, ok? Our famous curve again. Now, phase one, you know we put into this thing because companies couldn’t get themselves organized, I don’t realize that, but phase one of the study basically get your stakeholders in place. Uh… “Do you really want to do one of these things?” uh… and so on. It’s amazing, but people want things without deciding what they want to do them. So that was phase one. Phase two is establishing this trend, ok? Now here what you saw was that the trend was related to infection control. Now as you may know, um… basically what’s going on is that antibiotics are getting less effective over time and so hospitals that used to have a perfectly reasonable way to handle surgical infections, namely 2% of the people get infected but give them some antibiotics and you will be home free. It wasn’t working anymore. So increasingly, uh… patients are dying and uh… you know uh… huge amount of money been spend, trying to save them and beat back infection sort of difficult and so on and so forth. So people look ahead a little bit they say “You know what, this is gonna get worse. So we’d better do something about it.” So what this division did was sort of interesting. This division in the 3M study. What this division did was it made something called surgical drapes, it was, and is a form of infection control. What it amounted to was, think of wide stoch tape, ok? And what they would do is they would actually sort of, I assume you will not be awake for most of your surgical operations, but anyway what happens is that if you say have a surgery they shave up the hair and then they put on something like iodine or some sort of antibiotic, um… sorry antiseptic. Then they put on basically a saran rapper or stoch tape with glue on one side and that’s to sort of keep stuff out of the wound. And it’s called an inside strap because you cut right through it, ok. So imagine just slicing right through. Now that’s what this division made. Now here they were and what it happen over time was this become a commodity. There were a lot of other, they were selling a hundred of millions of it a year or that number, but a lot of other companies were selling them too and you just couldn’t make much money from it. So the question was “what are they gonna do now?” And that is a one product division basically, and are they going to close the division down or what’s gonna happen.
So you look here, you find this trend, you said “ok, the trend here is infection control, what can we do?” Now the next step, after you establish this trend, is to go and try to find lead users, ok? So now what you do, what you do is you don’t do a survey of all these users here, you sort of enter in at some point and find an expert. And you take your expert people and you talk to them. So you notice in the uh… in the uh… video you saw this thing about antibiotic overuse book, sort of image flashed up, there are somebody when you just sort of scan around and you see somebody and you say “well, ok that person must know something about it, or at least who be able to forward us for it.” You talk to that person and a person who is seriously interested in something will know two kinds of things. First, they would know whatever they know about the topic; second, they would tend to know somebody who knows more. So, you know, my wife is big on tennis playing and uh…she knows these things. She plays at clay a lot and she knows things like sliding on red clay how you do it all the way this sort of things I don’t even why would I want to but never mind.
And, but if I asked her “well ok, who know even more about that?” She’ll know, she’ll “oh… so and so who has a really good style on that, you should talk to so and so.” So what happens is you referred forward, they say no you really want to talk to so and so, that person in terms says you really out to talk to so and so, and you are moving your way. That way, relatively quickly towards the front, towards the leading edge users.
Now an interesting thing happens as you do this, you are changing your question as well as your answer, ok? So in this case, that people, you don’t have to, one of the good things is, you don’t have to start with smart questions. So the people came into this and they said, “our question is how do I make a better inside strap?” You go in, and what starts to happen is people start to say to you “you know what? That’s really not the issue here, something else is the issue.” And you, because you are talking one on one, and they, because they are experts not about to say to you “ok.” You are having a real discussion here. So what happen when they went forward is they went to the people who ended up doing oncology. Now one of the things about surgeons who do surgical operations on people with cancer is often they operate on the same patients again and again. Also those patients are typically neuron compromised or something because all the stuff you’ve been giving them. So infections are real problem. And what these people had noticed was that some people got infected no matter what you did and other people didn’t. Now, this change the mental set of the people from 3M going through here. And one of the things that happens if you want to get sort of out of the box with expect to thinking what you find is you have certain premises build in that are wrong but there are so much part of the atmosphere that you didn’t even know they are wrong or even wasn’t issue. Here the issue was, “gee, the drapes and the rest of that. What we do is we give everybody best possible care,” right. Highest standard care possible can go to everybody. The mental change here was “oops, some patients are different than others.” So really best possible care might differ for the 2% that get infected verses those 98% who do not.
And eventually what was sorted out with this, as you went to the front, was that the basically you know that you have hair follicles, you may not know that, so they uh… they can put antibiotic, sorry, was it anti-iodine or anti…right, antiseptic, thank you, on the surface but it doesn’t get into the hair follicles. And people carry around bacteria, which was higher or lower counts, and also more or less dangerous if it gets in. Now you are carry around is perfectly fine if it’s in the outside of your body, but once it gets in you are in trouble. So basically what’s going on here was surgeon’s knifes are pushing this stuff in. And some people had much more dangerous population of bacteria. The result was they were infecting themselves in fact.
Now, this changes the whole approach to what you do. Because the inside strap is to protect you from the outside kind of things, not to protect you from the inside kind of things. So what you saw here was then getting together with people to try to sort out what to do. And different people having different expect of the problem. Now did you notice that uh… that the groups of people at the end in the workshop, those people were not surgeons. There were couple of surgeons present but those are not your target market. Those were people who were users with different expects of this thing.
So it turned out, for instance, that the guy, remember the veterinarian surgeon who had very low infection rate. So you can find why did he care, he had, if you go down this thing about people who have big problem, he has a big problem because the animals often are dirty as sin, and he can’t really clean them up very well in the field and so on and so forth. You won’t bring a horse into your operating room. And so, and yet he was getting low infection rates. So what was he doing?
Now the person who had, do you remember the Broadway production’s person? The makeup person? One of the issues they are trying to understand here was how to heal the stuff on skin and so on very closely to the rest of it, and that person who was basically spending his time putting masks on and off, high profile actors, had figured out new ways to do that. Also there were people were not showing there, uh… who were people from like the um… Mars’ moon shuttle where turns out that one of the things you wanted to do when they were trying to figure out whether there was life on Mars, is they had figured out a way to make life related things fluoresces and then you can sent that signal back to earth.
See these oncologists here who were at the leading edge of the trend had figured out what was the problem. But they had a long time with their patients, they can spend, you know, a week or a month or what ever, so they can do cultures, to see what kind of problem these people had, what kind of bacteria they had. But if you are rolling into the trauma door, you know like somebody been shot, you can’t sort of say “well in two days we’ll operate on you, once we figure out what infection problem is.” So the nice thing about this fluoresces story was they were able to evolve a kind of patch, which basically you slap right on the person, they glow different colors depending on what kind of problem they got and then you can just sort of treat their problems there.
Now, what a huge difference, ok? Now the breakthrough again comes from the fact that they are breaking your mental set.
Now let me give you one more illustration that ties back also to what you saw in the picture. Do you remember that in the movie the picture of the car and then the airplane? Well, it was politically incorrect to say that car companies don’t care much about the et cetera and et cetera. Um… but anyway, the story there was all you do is you change this (infection control) now to “breaking”. Say you are an auto firm, and say breaking is an issue, ok. Now you go to the leading edge of people using car-like things, and you would probably get to racecars or something like that, right. People really what their break to make a sudden turn or so on and so forth. But you notice what happened there, once you get to the leading edge, what happens is people within the field have to go outside of the field to find leading users of similar things, ok. So in that instance, if you went out, you went to aerospace, which is not in your market at all. They are lead users with expect to the function, they are not lead users with automobile breaking, they are lead users with breaking. Now, do you know ABS, that breaking thing, you know when you press anything that “du.. du..” ok that noise right?
Ok, now, the real story about why cars didn’t do that, right, it’d been in aerospace before, wasn’t in cars, aerospace developed along with trains. The reason was that we were managed to control the skating with cars. You put salt all over the place, you put sand all over the place. You know in the winter you can eventually get around. Aerospace had a different problem, where the problem in the more extreme form. Aerospace could not put sand in the runways of the airport cause the sand will get into the engines and ruin them. You couldn’t put salt all over the runways cause salt would attack the body of the airplane, which also considered a bad idea. So they had to do something with the wheel itself and that’s what they did. So in affect what you are doing here by going outside of your own target market, is you are systematically varying the constrains on the users of relatively similar kind of problem. And so you can get again, an out of the box solution. Do you see what I mean? That’s kinda cool. Now, what I’m gonna do is, um…. Are the questions related to this? Yes please. Student: “First class we were talking about the motorcycle experience curve and the point of discontinuity, and in this example, really the point of discontinuity was one of those two doctors from Cleveland walk in with sort of that adhesive, how could you identify that point of discontinuity cause it seems like the leading edge user is more in cline to be the one who was on that high growth curve, not necessary in the point of discontinuity.” Well, the discontinuity really came there, in turns of solution, didn’t it, because the need, you could sort of have as continue, it was just more and more intense, uh… uh, need for infection control. And so basically what happens was guys innovated. And so then if you look at it, you can say what is the impact of this. And in fact peoples in the center of disease controls said this is a breakthrough, this is brand new, important thing. But actually the exist in a fact, you know, you are not jumping to a known other curve. Student: “yeah, I guess that’s my question, if technology really creates market, it would be rather difficult to find lead user.” But what you are doing here is you falling out of the needs. See, you are identifying the technology, which is found by people with high needs, and then if you watch you can do your curve and say, “ok, if this one is a higher performance curve on certain dimensions than that one.” But it’s like the florescent light verses incandesces light, before you invent florescent you can’t really say “ah, when am I gonna jump to that curve” ok? So what this is really about is who does the innovations, and then you can put it in the context to one of those curves, ok. Say… Sure, you are very welcome, good question.
Anything else? I am gonna actually ask you guys to do something, that’s so sad, isn’t it? I’m gonna actually ask you to, uh… do some exercise here in a minute. Uh… let’s see what I’ve got here for you. Ok, I’m gonna backup… uh… gonna go forward.
Ok, now, you got 10 minutes for this. What I like you to do is think about possible lead users in your market, ok. Now what I mean by “your market” is chose something that you know quite well. What you are trying to do here is to play with the idea, not find the new invention with yourself somewhere else or you don’t know enough yet. What the methodology does is it says to you “go out and talk to experts outside and get information and bring it in.” Since you are playing with the information here, that’s only in your own heads. What you have to do is to take a place where your head is well populated with information, ok? So, select this specific market & specific major trend to think about, ok. Doesn’t have to be exotic and it should be a narrow market. You are not talking about all computers; you are talking about fault tolerating computers. You are not talking about all foods; you are talking about lutra-sutical whatever is food, functional foods, or whatever they are called, ok? Some narrow niche. Then think about possible lead users within that target market. Which types of individuals or firms have needs at the leading edge of the trends? Which ones have a high incentive & the resources to solve their leading edge needs? In another words, these are, who are your lead users, ok. So the example of the auto thing that I show you earlier, that would be within your market and that would be… Remember if this was breaking, so this would be like the racecar people, or something like that. Then think, well, “possible lead users outside of the target market, other fields & applications, facing a similar need but in a more demanding form.” Ok? So those might be, in the case of our example, aerospace. So say hello again to your neighbor, and figure this out. Take 10 minutes.
So how did you do? Who’s got a great example? Lucimy? Lachine. “We were thinking about cooking and about how you have to watch out for food contamination or salmonellas and things like that about food. So we were thinking that, uh…originally we were thinking people that prepare a lot of food have to worry about this, like companies that prepare food for the airlines, or cruise ships need to watch out for this stuff. But then we kinda went outside the target market and try to think about the scientific labs, like how they wash they have to process so they don’t contaminate lab samples or doctors that have to make sure the surgical equipments are perfect before surgery. And then we went a little bit beyond that, sort of thinking about the genetic engineering, and how you can buy samples and keep track of your samples.”
Ok, so by the way, you are… how to keep track of your samples might work well for his idea lead users, right? Yeah, but absolutely great! So food or contamination, right, food contamination, and you know people are more and more concerned. And then, you said, that’s wonderful; you said ok uh… restaurant chains and so on, right, but then outside of that, you said uh… you know labs. Because often people, you know, these people have a huge cost issue attached to, like in food chains and so on and so forth. And a lot of these times, innovation comes from people who don’t have that much of a constrain or at least they have such huge need but they are not facing the same issue, then you bring it down. This is the same thing with ABS breaking. Basically it cases a hell of a lot for airplane to do that, and you brought it down in cost when you got it into cars. But the aerospace people would willing to do the work cause in airplane cost a hundred million dollars are reasonable. Kinda a fraction of a whole to invest in, right.
So, very cool. Now, what I am going to do is to show you a brief videotape, um… 6 minutes. Showing you this piece where again, it’s identification out of the box, focuses on this moving outside of your target market and how this is working, ok. Now the particular story here is this is the Nortel Network one where they were trying to find innovating lead users with expect to, uh… road warrior kind of people who were going around with their cell phones and location base kind of services, ok, they are coming out now-a-days. You know where you can order ahead to your local McDonald’s, just go whizzing right through the thing and pick up your Big Mac without any pause, you don’t even slow your car just let them throw in… Anyway, ok, so that’s the story, uh… uh, it’s Nortel. You’ll see how far away they get from their target market, ok.
Question, sorry.
Student: “in the previous video we watch how to construct a team to develop some inside with the class, is that the construction you want to get to lead users or you just want them to go anywhere by themselves?“
That’s very helpful. Basically what you do… Remember that lead user workshop, which is section 4? What this lead user team, you have these experts in the company, ok; there were many manufacturing experts as well. And what you do is you sort have your eye on “could I reuse the cost of this thing? Does it make sense at all?” You know, so, for example in the case of aerospace you can go and you can look at that thing and you say “well now, that breaking system cost a huge amount, that cost me more than the car, ridiculous.” But the people inside here who know about manufacture sort of thing said, “we could do that now. In high volume we can do something about that.”
So you have your eye on that and then what happens is you get people together in this workshop… and thank you for raising this whole thing. You get the people together in the workshop and you can give them instructions like that, and what each person is doing is taking their knowledge and combining it and saying, “well, yeah... ok, I’m from the aerospace industry and I know this cost ten thousand dollars to build an ABS system. But here is the principle that I understand and here is how you can achieve it and so on and so forth.” So, yeah, you do in a workshop, first of all, before the workshop you were the people having an idea of what make sense and what doesn’t. And then within the workshop, uh… you are giving them instructions as to what make sense for you cause you are trying to pull together things that make sense for your company. Very good point.
Ok.
Lead user search in action. (http://www.leaduser.com/training_materials.html)
What you saw there was an issue about, you know, mobility based communication, right, was your trend, which I’ll called mob, and what you had there were different lead users on different attributes to the thing. None of them did you notice were basically the people that in target market holding a cell phone to their ears as they went to McDonald’s, right. It was really fascinating. Now the people who were dealing with the animal track, their issue was, how do you get bandwidth when you don’t know where these things gonna be. You know, it happens in arctic, there is no cell phone network. How do you do it? And they work up some sort of dianthuses methods, that’s what we call it, where basically they grab anything that came by any satellite, they came by, they sort of grab signal and so on and so forth. Now, the battle lab store, do you remember the image of that small battle lab in there? The issue with battle lab is, they got tons of moving people and tanks and everything else when they moving around, and they have to filter the information and give them just what they need in the real time bases. So there was a huge expect of filter in what you need and pulling out just what you needed, (that was) something those people exploring in depth. And finally the issue from the storm chasers was really also very interesting. That was about everything’s moving. You know, they don’t have a base network and they don’t know where it was. Instead they have airplanes flying around and trucks flying around and storms flying around and everything was dynamic and they had sort of tied to a grid. So, uh, they had all things to do that. And you can take all those information and put it together into a solution that’s unique for yourselves.
Now what I quickly want to do is go back to um… this thing here, and tell you that…. Ok, here is the methodology, and this is the first methodology you heard about in the course. And basically we didn’t feel responsible about letting it out there until we tried it out. So we did the equivalent of what you do in the FDA, sort of natural experiment, we did a controlled study. And I didn’t even do it myself; I had these other field types who would keep me honest. What you don’t want to do here is to promote a religion, you know, as appose to something which actually work… So what we did was we took a particular moment in time. This is 3M, which is using a lot of this stuff, and we compare in the same division with same people, you know, same motivation and all the rest of it. We compare projects that were funded; both of these projects were funded, so these represent all the projects funded. Five of them were lead user projects, um… 42 of them were not, in a particular period of time, controlling all sorts of things, and we tried to see what the outcomes would look alike. And what you can see here is something quite strong, you can see in the red you see the idea, the lead users are here on the left column, and the non-lead users are on the right. The non-lead user on the right is a traditional marketing research kind of approach, finding need and fill it. You can see the novelty is higher and you can also see that the uh… you know, market share is higher but also, you know, because you are coming in new and you are the early one, and the estimated sales are like 8 times higher. And these now have been proven out. So you got this amazing difference, with expect to how this works. Now, how could this be? You know it’s like the old economist joke, there can’t be a five dollar bill lying down there because if there was a five dollar bill lying down there somebody will already picked it up. Will now this here, how come industrial practice is so backward with expect to this? And I think what it is, is that in fact they think they’ve got a solution and you seldom really need breakthroughs. Now, what the uh, what you see here is, this is the definition of a breakthrough we used, which is “major product line greater than 20% of the division sales,” effecting the future growth and, that was sort of within 3M the definition of a breakthrough. Incremental was valuable to existing business. What you could see is that basically 3M’s traditional method was producing incremental innovations. And what I’ll show you when we get to talking about standard marketing research and how it works, which I think is maybe next time, even the time after. I’ll show you why that is. It’s designed to do the incremental, but the remarkable thing here was that in fact this was doing breakthroughs e.g. the first of the major product line. So it was providing on a relatively systematic base what this particular company was searching for, which was “gosh, we always in this position where we were sort of running down the market and we were ending up with incremental innovations and we were getting low margins and low growth and what we do now? Oh, I wish lighting strike and produce innovation that was major.” And so what this is, is in fact direct lighting you can actually do on demand. And there is only one that actually shown in the uh… website of this. I think they are only innovation for 2001 or something like this. Um… and this was a form of packaging that is taking off for people who are just sending stuff around. And it’s very cheap and all rest of that. And where it came from was people trying to ship delicate medical specimens and they had developed the methods to put this stuff through US post office, which is not known for delicacy handling. And they had developed a method and this method could be converted to a method that could be used um… by everybody. So it’s again that same principle. Ok, I think that all I want to say, uh… it takes a little bit more effort to do this thing because you are sort of up front and you are learning how to do a search process, which is very different than this standard one. Later on when we talk about resistance innovation we’ll talk about the fact that it’s not easy to get people to use a different methodology. Ok, that’s all for today. Last Modified 8/8/05 12:40 AM |
