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June 19, 2007
From technology to experience
The I-Cubed Economy is often thought of as technology-driven. However, technology is only one part of innovation. And as Nick Carr keeps pointing out, in many ways, technology can become a commodity. One of the hard things for us to get our heads around is how to create a non-technology strategy. This is especially true in so-called high-tech industries.
Apple is one company that has shown the way. The iPod is a design and business model breakthrough, not a technological one. Now comes a story in Business Week about another company -- peripheral maker Kensington (see Kensington's Peripheral Challenge):
Like Nintendo, Kensington's competitors are locked in a battle to deliver more sophisticated technology and longer lists of features. And like Nintendo, Kensington has chosen to opt out of the technology arms race and turned to product experience as a competitive advantage.
The result is Kensington's Ci Lifestyle Collection, a new line of mice and keyboards for home and mobile users designed with extensive field research on customer experience in mind. But as Juan Ernesto Rodriguez, senior global product manager for Kensington explained to me, shifting Kensington's thinking from a technology-driven approach to an experience-driven one wasn't easy.
Kensington revamped its design strategy to focus on creating user-driven products - and then looked for the technology to make it work. That is backward from our normal view of the process -- at least in policy circles -- where the drive is to turn every technology into a new product. This linear, pipeline approach to innovation is one of the most enduring remnants of our old assembly line mentality. For all our policy wonk sophistication, we desperately and unconsciously cling to this model. Even when we say we don’t, our policy actions betray us. Our solutions – more funding for science and for commercial R&D, better mechanisms for technology transfer, reform to intellectual property protection – all seem to stem from that linear model.
Trying to conceptualize a new model of innovation is difficult. It starts from the recognition that end users needs – not the technology – should be driving the process. Think about technology as a pool of resources that entrepreneurs and product designers dip into to solve their problems.
But what that means for public policy, we have a hard time fathoming. Instead, we cling to the old standard set down over half a century ago: basic research is a public good and if we feed that process, everything else will flow from it.
Unfortunately, that formulation is only half right. R&D is a public good. But it is only one of many inputs into the process. Research on user needs is another. Yet, it is generally agreed that we should have government programs to specifically educate scientists and engineers but not specifically to educate people in those market researcher, product designer and applied anthropology skills that Kensington needed to change its strategy. So we feed the pool of innovation with technologies but don’t teach people how to fish in it.
Somehow, that just doesn’t make sense to me anymore.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at June 19, 2007 9:02 AM
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