Why are some techs so slow to penetrate the market

By Stefano Virgilli — We live in a society that “spoilt us”. For every single task in our daily routine we expect to find an app that processes that task for us. We have mobile phones more powerful than the computers who sent man on the moon. We have wearable devices that measure pretty much every function of our body. Yet, there are tons of technologies out there that are widely tested and still not available for the average Joe. There are several reasons, but first it is important to understand the implementation pipeline of  some technologies, from the inventor, all the way to the global market. Take for example the fax. Would you have guessed that it was first invented and patented in 1843? That was even before Germany and Italy become independent countries! And still 100 years later, the product was not ready for the market, or vice versa, the market could not either afford or understand the product. Experiments for perfecting a cooling system, later called Air-Conditioning, begun in the second half of the 1700. It took more than 2 centuries to become a commercial product. History is filled with stories of technologies that took their own sweet time before the market could benefit from their innovation. Nowadays the “lifecycle” is indeed shorter, however many technologies are slow at being implemented. In February 2002 I was sent to Stockholm by my university to explore a partnership with the Japanese giant Omron. At that time they had already in place a technology able to identify people among  a multitude by scanning the face features. I recall my feeling of amazement when I saw the camera installed in a train station, recognising a suspect among over 50 people walking by. The same technology could tell apart identical twin brothers. It was rather impressive because what I saw in 2002, and it might be available on an iPhone 7, exactly 15 years later. Why did it take so long to implement the same exact technology for consumers? My very much not empirical theory pinpoints a few logic ideas that could be at the root of such delay. It goes by steps. Step 1: A “geek” or rather a researcher, comes across a new possibility and decides to invest time in further exploring Step 2: The person who came up with the idea fails several times and: Gives up, but lets someone else with more money and more manpower, to carry on. Finds an investor to provide bandwidth, to carry on. Step 3: Whoever has continued the development of the technology manages to achieve some small, but promising, results. Step 4: Some academic institution shows interest in the technology and decides to run a research on it, but gets stuck into “methodology” issues and the technology suffers tremendous delays. Step 5: Some corporate identifies potential in the technology, but too many legal concerns, standard operating procedures and feasibility test place the technology in a slow funnel. Step 6: Now the innovation has suffered the worst side of both academic and corporate, and has learned a major lesson: “follow the market”. Step 7: Some “indie” companies or startups embrace the technology as nearly the core business. For a while they appear to have success, but eventually they fail. Step 8: Some other startup learn from the mistakes of the previous startups and manage to successfully operate the technology at low budget and decent potential. Step 9: A big corporate buys the startup and now owns the technology. Step 10: After solving many legal concerns, standard operating procedures and feasibility test, the corporate finally manages to provide the technology to the market. Eventually all consumers can access the innovation. Although I might have dramatised some parts of the narration, the steps are pretty much a realistic representation of what really happens from inception to distribution of a new technology. What I have omitted is the presence of the government in some technologies. For instance, with regards to thumbprint recognition, there were many policies and regulations preventing private companies from storing thumbprint and from collecting excessive private data. But eventually all is possible, and all technologies, in one way or another, become part of our daily routine. — vs.voxlab.net@gmail.com