Why Segway Failed To Reshape The World: Focused On Invention, Rather Than Innovation

from the that-ain't-the-solution dept

In January of 2001, word began to leak that Dean Kamen was working on something amazing that would change the world. If you were paying attention to tech news, you may recall it was everywhere. There was some book deal about it, and we were told that it was going to change the way cities were laid out and would absolutely revolutionize transportation. It had the blessing of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr and was amazing. But no one knew what it was. Hell, it didn't even have a name. It was referred to either as IT or Ginger -- and there were all sorts of rumors about what IT might be. Eventually, of course, IT was revealed as the Segway. And while it was sorta kinda maybe cool, it hardly came close to living up to its original billing. It was expensive and not really all that useful for most people. Segway, the company, has gone through a merry-go-round of new CEOs and new strategies, none of which have gotten it out of a niche market.

Recently, in talking about how the Netflix Prize helped demonstrate the value of openness and collaboration when it came to innovation, rather than hoarding and taking the "inventor-knows-best" attitude towards things, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology (a tech industry lobbying group who tends to be a patent system supporter) took exception to what we said about the value of openness and collaboration instead of focusing on patents, by noting that Dean Kamen has also put a lot of effort into collaboration and prizes to award innovation, but also is a strong believer in patents (and, actually, making them stronger).

In response, I pointed out that Kamen's thinking on patents may actually explain part of the reason why Segway has struggled so much over the years. In believing so strongly in patents, it shows someone who tends to believe invention is more important than ongoing innovation, even as there's a growing body of evidence to suggest the exact opposite is true. Invention is the original idea, but innovation is an ongoing process of taking a product and adjusting and adapting it to the market. And we've been seeing more and more studies that note the innovation part is so much more important in determining the success and the economic contribution of a product.

So it seems like perfect timing to see Paul Graham's recent essay about why the Segway failed to change the world. He focuses mainly on the fact that the Segway basically makes people look dorky -- and that a better design might have helped more people find it enticing. But at the end he notes:

Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

Exactly. Again, this highlights the difference between invention (believing that you alone have come up with the perfect idea for a great product) and innovation (the ongoing iterative process of going back and forth with the market to test and understand what the market wants and how to make your product meet their needs). By focusing so much on the invention, Segway missed the real opportunity for innovation, and that's caused all sorts of problems for the company.

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The Role Of Abundance In Innovation

from the it-increases-it... dept

A few weeks back, Dennis wrote about a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about innovation, but I was just shown another article from the same issue, by Adam Gropnik, which may be even more interesting. Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention," by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you're just focused on getting through the day. You don't have time to experiment and try to improve things -- you make do with what you have. It's in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.

This makes a lot of sense... and certainly fits with plenty of other things we've seen in recent research. Innovation tends to occur not because of one brilliant idea from one brilliant individual -- but as an ongoing process, with lots of folks tossing different ideas at the wall, and seeing what sticks. Invention is the beginning process, but then people innovate around various inventions to improve it and make it acceptable to the market. In fact, this is why we tend to think that the long run impact of investment bubbles isn't usually bad. Historically, the impact of bubbles has actually been quite good, and it's for exactly these reasons. Within the bubble there is tremendous abundance, and that allows for many different ideas to get tested incredibly quickly. The bad ones fail, but plenty of good ideas (and infrastructure) stick around. It's bad if you get caught up in the investment bubble, but it's good for the overall economy in the long run.

This also should (again) get people to rethink some issues surrounding patents. If it's that abundance and experimenting that leads to all that innovation, aren't we holding back that innovation by enforcing artificial scarcity, and allowing one company to entirely block others from doing the necessary experiments? In Chris Anderson's latest book, he builds on Carver Mead's idea about transistors becoming so abundant that it makes sense to "waste" them. This makes a tremendous amount of sense if you start to follow through the economic implications of "wasting" goods that are effectively infinite. When "wasted," they create new opportunities where none existed before. The innovation that comes out of abundance comes from such "waste." It comes from the ability to invent and tinker and experiment and see what sticks -- and you can't do that when you have massive scarcities -- real or artificial. So why is it that our innovation policy is still focused on enforcing scarcities when that's the exact opposite of what's needed to encourage innovation?

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Patent Lawsuit Over Shazam Highlights The Difference Between Invention And Implementation

from the what-a-waste dept

A few folks have sent in variations on the news that Apple and AT&T have been sued for patent infringement over the fact that the music recognition service Shazam can be used on the iPhone. The patent in question covers a music recognition system that certainly does sound like Shazam's. While it's lame that the patent holder is going after third parties like Apple and AT&T, this lawsuit really highlights how silly the patent system is. Shazam has been around for ages. I remember meeting up with some folks from Shazam many, many years ago, soon after they had started. They had a music recognition system at the time, but it didn't work all that great, and there was no real market for it. So they spent many years continually tinkering with and improving the system, and adapting to the market as it changed -- and finally had a hit when the iPhone app store came out. That is the process of innovation. The idea was a useful starting point, but it was meaningless until the idea could be implemented in a way that the market wanted. And, yet, some guy who had the same idea, but didn't go through the trials and tribulations of actually making it work for the market, suddenly gets to demand tons of money for it? That's an economic and societal waste.

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Innovation And Invention In Virtual Rock Band Video Games

from the timing-matters dept

Reader David Kopp writes in to point us to a story in the Boston Globe that yet again highlights the difference between innovation and invention -- this time in the virtual musician video game space. While we've already seen that Konami has sued over the video game Rock Band, claiming that it had patented the concept of virtual musician games, the Globe story highlights a Massachusetts startup that appears to have come up with a similar idea much earlier. The game was slightly different, but had many of the same elements -- including a virtual guitar (that had actual strings in this case) and involved playing along with music on the screen. The band Aerosmith played a big part in the game, predating all the bands suddenly jumping on the Guitar Hero and Rock Band bandwagons of today.

The game was moderately successful, but was clearly ahead of its time in a variety of ways. The game was way too expensive, first of all, as the virtual guitar added an extra $100 to the $50 game price. The company also had trouble figuring out how to properly market the game, especially with the extra guitar. Also, since it was a PC game, it was less convenient than today's console games, which are mostly played around a big television. These were all issues that were later worked out, but not in time for the folks at Virtual Music Entertainment, who had already sold out for a decent, but not enormous, payout in 2000. Still, it's nice to see they're not bitter or threatening to sue:

"Whether they stole it or not, it was a good idea. They were at the right place at the right time, and they executed it really well."

And that's exactly the point. Executing and getting it right is difficult, but that's what the market is designed to reward, and that's what really drives innovation.

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The Difference Between Invention And Innovation In The Netbook Space

from the it's-all-about-the-tweaking dept

Business Week's Steve Hamm has a short post talking about the "sudden" success of "netbooks," those mini-laptops that are suddenly selling like crazy. As he notes, smaller laptops are not a new idea, and have been tried for many years in varying formats without much success. But, for some reason, after so many different experiments, it seems that the sweet spot in terms of size, usability and price have all been found.

This actually highlights something quite common in technology innovation: the difference between the idea, the invention and the actual innovation. Just the idea alone wasn't enough to actually make the product valuable. Finding that real sweetspot is a challenge for just about any product, and it involves an awful lot of experimentation to make it work. I've been reading about the early days of a number of inventions lately, and you see this story over and over again, where the initial versions really have no market, and it's a later, totally minor tweak that suddenly makes it valuable. And, of course, the best way to get that tweak to happen quickly (and thus expand a market, and improve the overall economy) is to let a lot of different players experiment to throw a lot of ideas at the market to see what actually does hit that sweet spot. Tragically, with a patent system that grants monopoly protection at the invention stage, this is often a lot more difficult, slowing down the attempts to actually hit that sweetspot.

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No, This Guy Didn't Invent The iPod 30 Years Ago

from the try-again dept

Two and a half years ago, we wrote about the claims of Kane Kramer, a guy who claimed to have invented the iPod thirty years ago, and was talking to lawyers to see if he had a case against Apple. As we explained at the time, Kramer did not invent the iPod at all. He created a very early digital music player, that had much less functionality that couldn't store more than a few minutes of music, which never got anywhere in the marketplace, and for which all of his patents had long expired. To say that he had invented the iPod would be like saying that the first guy who threw a block of ice in a box "invented" the air conditioner.

Yet, here we go again, as the DailyMail in the UK is claiming that Apple has admitted that this guy did, in fact, invent the iPod. However, again, that's not true at all. What happened was that Apple had him provide some evidence in its dispute with Burst.com (which was eventually settled). Basically, what Apple was doing wasn't admitting that Kramer "invented the iPod" but was showing that there was plenty of prior art (including Kramers) that predated Burst's highly questionable patents.

That doesn't mean that Kramer invented the iPod. It just means that his work predated Burst's claim of a monopoly on some specific technology that it claimed Apple infringed. That's a long way from "inventing the iPod." Besides, there were plenty of digital music players prior to the iPod. In fact, the real revolution around the iPod wasn't the fact that it was a digital player, but that it was the first digital player that had significant storage and could carry large collections of music at once -- something that Kramer's player never could do. So, please, can we stop repeating this myth that he somehow invented the iPod. He didn't.

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No Shortage Of Ideas... It's Successfully Bringing Them To Market That's Tricky

from the always-the-challenge dept

For years, plenty of people have pointed out the difference between innovation and invention, with a popular quote (attributed to way too many different people over the years) being that "invention is turning money into ideas; innovation is turning ideas into money." Basically, invention is coming up with a new idea -- innovation is successfully bringing a product to market in a way that people want. Where some people disagree is how important each of these stages are. Our position has been that innovation is a lot more important than invention. Successfully bringing a product to market is what makes the world a better place -- because it satisfies needs in the market and expands the economy. There were music players before the iPod, but Apple innovated the iPod into more of a "must have" device. There were cars before Ford, but he innovated to make it affordable for the average person. This is one of the reasons why we have such trouble with the patent system as it's currently designed. It rewards invention, but makes innovation more difficult and expensive.

A new study supports this point by showing that in most companies executives are a lot more worried about innovation than invention, saying that they're overwhelmed with ideas. It's successfully executing and putting those ideas into practice in a way that makes money that's so difficult. The study found only 17% of companies where execs were worried about not having the necessary ideas. Instead, most companies were greatly worried with taking those ideas and actually being able to bring them to market successfully. So once again, we're seeing that it's innovation that's the bigger challenge than invention. In fact, it seems that many companies feel that there are too many ideas going around -- and the real challenge is in executing and bringing those ideas successfully to market. So, why is it that our public policy is focused on just the invention process (of which there appears to be too much) while making it more expensive and difficult to execute and bring products to market (which is the real challenge companies are facing)?

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