Wharton - Chapter 6

Traditional market research will not cut it in emerging technology. That is the general idea surrounding chapter six in the Wharton book on emerging technologies. This chapter explores the uncertainty and unknown that comes with putting out a technology to market that does not exist. It is not prudent to use the standard focus group or an assumed market to test your product, as these may lead to incorrect or uncompleted information, as well as possibly uncommitted or uninformed testers. The worst thing a company can do is to use a close-minded approach to market research that attempts to direct their product to a specific market or to the market they think they are addressing. They are best to embrace a wide range of possibilities and use a "Triangulation of Insights" and use multiple methods such as using lead users or learning about latent needs or anticipating inflections. Adoption of a product takes the shape of a bell curve, and the forefront of that adoption is the lead users. They are not picky or high-maintenance, just adoptive of the technology as-is and can provide valuable insight into what processes the technology can be valuable for or the needs or requirements the technology may need to further develop. Latent needs are needs that the customer does not even know they have, such as the example that Kimberly-Clark noticed that parents do not want diapers to be waste collectors, but rather "clothing" for their children. And the anticipation of inflection if the high point of the aforementioned bell-curve, which assess the areas of opportunity within a technology where people can evaluate what they may want in a more "futuristic" environment that this technology may address. As Clayton Christensen states in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" (Page 50), once a technology is past its point of inflection, and its technology is decreasing at a decreasing rate (I would call this diminishing returns to technology. That's my new term) then a new technology is ready to emerge to supplant that existing one. Anticipation of that point of inflection on the technology S-curve is where the company can gain a comparative advantage ahead of their competition.