[MUSIC].
Next, industry constraints. We talk about competition, we talk about
suppliers, we talk about markets and the roles that those play in constraining
innovation. Well here we have this problem where
there's, with this golden boy mentality. Venture capital funding, we just talked a
great deal about that. what happened was these people got
together and they assumed this was a technological product.
This was not a technological product. The product was a technology certainly,
but people were not going to use it in a technological way.
One thing they also did was they only used insiders to test ideas.
There's this notion of, you know, it has to be top secret, it has to be top
secret. We can't let anyone else know about this.
And so they only used insiders, people that they trusted, but also insiders who
were people who were always going to tell them what they wanted to hear.
They also, I mean by the way, they didn't bring users into the design process.
That early on they didn't bring people in and say hey what do you think.
Well that's basically par for the course with someone like Steve Jobs, also with
Dean Kamen who view themselves as very, very smart, the smartest person in the
room. They're also able to see things that
others can't see. They're a visionary in that way and so
they're seeing this thing and saying this is how it's going to be.
And if you don't see it's just because you're blind it's just because it's not
the right thing to do and so that kind of mentality in the venture capitalist
industry I think drove them to have this kind of view.
Also the tech industry added to that in fact there's a bunch of engineers and
people talking to each other made it very much more difficult for them to see what
was going on outside. In terms of infrastructure.
So we talk about the market and we'd understood from our discussion about
industry constraints is that adoption costs are a big deal.
And that if people buy something and that forces them to change a lot of their
behaviors or change the things, change the things that they assume about
themselves. Change the ways that they Or go about
things that's problematic. So in this case New York City has been
expanding its bicycle bike pass system which would be great for a segway.
However it's 10 years late. Right.
So this is 10 years later before the infrastructure was in place to be able to
use for the segway. And when this thing was built.
The bike, this bike path was built. They're built for bicycles.
And in many cases segways were forbidden from riding on bicycle paths.
next is aisle constraints. We're talking about values and
identities, social control and history, the things we've talked about earlier in
this set of lectures. So is the segway socially acceptable?
You know, is it socially aceptable. Is it something you are so proud of that
you are going to ride down the middle of the street in your skimpiest outfit with
your tiara... Miss Broadway, or that something that's
unacceptable, like you know, Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
Which is it? I was reading, as I was doing on the
Segway, I ran across some, bulletin boards, that is some discussion boards
where people are talking about the Segway.
And here's one included this guy that said he was busted in Denver.
He said a police officer basically pulled him over, said your not allowed to ride a
Segway in Denver except on private property.
And the guy says well, you know, I, I, I'm not aware of any law against Segways.
And so the police officer who responded right, do you want me to give it to you
in a ticket, so you have it in writing. So apparently there are[UNKNOWN] in this
case explicit controls, explicit social control, for where you are allowed to
drive it. And, ironically, this person, then goes
on to say, how when he rode home, he sat next to a person on a bicycle and the
person on the bicycle complimented him for being, sort of, eco-friendly, in the
device that he was using. So he wasn't in a car, but he's using the
selected device, at work. And he says, too bad politicians and
police don't see it that way, that is, the fact that he is doing something good.
And it's not something bad that he's doing.
So here's the problem of social values, right?
That he has different values than the values of the society, and society is
pushing back against that. So, as these things get banned.
they're considered too slow for the street and too fast for the sidewalk.
You can't ride on either. What do you do?
Well is it because it's too dangerous? Well guess what?
Bicycles are pretty dangerous too. In fact lots, a lot more people die on
and, and are injured on bicycles, probably because there are a lot more
bicycles. But one thing with bicycles, we
understand how they work. And so maybe the danger is apparent to
us. We understand what the dangers are.
Whereas, with this new technology that we aren't sure how it works, we're not sure
what potential harm will come to people. And there is the potential for harm.
If you don't believe me just type Segway Crash into YouTube and you'll understand
it is potentially a very dangerous device, and so that's the thing that
people are trafficking. Another kind of danger of this device
came in the form of the battery. And so you may remember a time when these
laptops were catching on fire and exploding.
This particular laptop in fact, they had to evacuate an, a, office building,
office tower because this thing caught on fire and exploded, and here's what's,
what's left of it. And so it was these lithium batteries
that was the problem. These lithitum batteries, there was a big
recall on them. Apparently if you charged them improperly
they're subject to this thing called thermal runaway, where this thing gets
hotter and hotter and hotter, and then just explodes.
Well guess what, the Segway is specified to have a lithium-ion battery,not just a
few ounces of it like that laptop but 22 pounds of lithium.
And so one of the ideas for the Segway is that you people to take this on an
airplane, go to your next place and ride around, and this would displace the
rental car. Well, with 22 pounds of lithium, subject
to that kind of blow up and burning up, there's no way on earth you're going to
be allowed to take on a plane. And so in fact, they were banned on
planes. And this person in this, in this, again,
I'm from, is one of these discussion boards, talks about, the kind of battery
that they use is not this phosphate battery, they use, actually use a
different kind of battery, in the Segway. But it was specified for a lithium
battery, and that's what it says in the the data sheets.
And so there on that basis it was banned. So, even on a perception that it's going
to explode. Even though it may not be true.
It was enough to think this thing. We want to think about diffusion rates.
So what were they thinking? How fast did they think this thing would
be adopted by people? Was it something like the telephone here,
which seemed to have taken a long while? Or was it something more Quick.
Like one of theses other things like the radio.
Like the m radio or something. That was seemed to be a very rapid uptake
of bi people. And then what drives these adoption rates
and how do we think about those. So here some different categories of
things with different difffusion rates. It's very dificult to predict.
Now Marketing people and user analysis people are the kind of people who could
help us understand these things but those weren't the kind of people they were
having on the team when they were developing the segway and so again these
are the kind of things these kind of social constraints that things that stop
people the way that people view these things that stop people from adopting
were not being considered. So, societal constraints, values, social
control, and history, we can see all three of those things are ones that seem
to be constraining the adoption of the segway.
Now for the sake of completeness, let's talk about technical constraints.
I know we're not going to talk about it at great length until next week.
But let me just sort of preview for you and say there are going to be three kinds
of constraints. Control of physical world, like to what
extent do we know how to control the world, making matter behave.
Time is another one. The timing sequence, windows of
opportunity, those things can be constraints for us.
And also the natural environment. Getting access to the resources that we
need. Need in the natural environment may be a
constraint as well, so those are what we're going to call the technical
constraints. So, from the perspective of the technical
constraints, the Segway really did not have a lot of technical constraints.
The Segway was a the Segway Beta, the Segway was a derivative of a innovation
that had already happened. It was the iBot, right, so they basically
just took two wheels off the iBot made it a little bit more rugged, and then it
became the Segway. And so there was not a problem for it to
be developed in that way. You know, maybe the battery, they were
still working on, but basically, it was not rocket science.
It was not a big deal technically to make this thing work.
So, if I look at the constraints of taking these all together, so we've been
through them all individual, the reliance on prior successes, and this was Dean
Kamen's failure, to think about this problem differently than he had before,
and also the other individuals around him, Steve Jobs, Bezos, all those.
Through the group constraints, there was no process, the lack of problem
definition, they were doing emotion processing, not information processing.
The organizational structure organizational constraints, we get this,
argue the structure was problematic because the way the organizational who
was composed of, also the, everyone reported to Dean, we had sort of a
benevolent dictator model there, and also the market strategy seemed to be off.
