Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

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EVALUATION
A great company is more likely to die of indigestion
from too much opportunity than starvation from
too little.
—David Packard, founder, HP
Nobody has ever bet enough on a winning horse.
—Richard Sasuly, author, horseracing authority
A key to creating and implementing an offering that will
drive a new category or subcategory is an accurate evaluation
of the prospects of a concept and the ability to pull it off.
The Segway case provides a good illustration of the diffi culties
of both.
Segway ’ s Human Transporter
Dean Kamen was a successful inventor mainly in the medical
device fi eld. One of his inventions was a wheelchair, the iBot,
that could climb stairs. That technology provided the basis for
a far more exciting product, the Segway Human Transporter
(HT), introduced in 2001. An upright, two - wheeled people
mover with which the driver could accelerate or stop simply by
leaning forward or backward, it could travel up to 12 mph and
had a 17 - mile range before needing recharging. Its core mechanism
was termed dynamic stabilization and involved six gyroscopes,
two tilt sensors, and a dual computer system capable of
adjusting the Segway one hundred times a second.
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