Wasted Innovations

During a meeting this past Tuesday in Denver, a most amazing event occurred: The owner of the company was struggling to use his just purchased Apple watch when he uttered these stunning words: "I have a Rolex"!!  A moment of silence please whilst you digest the enormity of that comment...............

In case the enormity escaped you, a $ 500 Apple watch had replaced one of the finest watches in the world whose price tag averages five figures.  A watch mass produced by underpaid workers in China replaced one made by the finest Swiss craftsman with hundreds of years of tradition behind them!  Now that is one mother of all sacrifices just to put smartwatch capability on your wrist. 

The flight home that evening was consumed by that Rolex/Apple Watch disparity.....

For those of you who have read my other posts and updates you know that the IoT is a real place where actual solutions have been installed and new innovation taking place everyday!  From the retail sector, factory floor, energy, smart car, farm, ranch, oil pipeline, city center and even your refrigerator, innovations in the IoT are working all around us.   Of course the perfect storm that has catapulted the IoT into this massive ecosystem is new so the success stories of today are but a google fraction (yeh, just came up with that....my dictionary says it means really small fraction!) of what's to come. 

Throughout history, creativity has been the furnace from which innovation and thereby evolution and revolution has occurred.  With the IoT, innovation of a magnitude not seen since the industrial revolution is in full swing.  Fueled by ideas, very small companies are popping up with a service or product that could revolutionize some aspect of your life, a business or, perhaps, alter the very way the wind has blown for hundreds of years.  Many of these companies have attracted funding, grown rapidly and are moving that idea through the process to eventual market reality.  Of course many have gone to market, have clients and are in the process of actually changing the world.  One must also remember that some really big companies are also leading the IoT with fantastic innovations of their own.  

The IoT is not without some challenges.  The press, pundits and bloggers want you to believe that the number of deployed devices and market size are the big issues facing the IoT today.  Yep, to them it's that debate between 50 billion or 200 billion devices installed and a $ 5 trillion or $ 20 trillion market by 2020 that are the key issues for the IoT.  I guess when you can't come up with anything creative to say you can just regurgitate boring made-up statistics.  But there is an issue facing companies in the IoT ecosystem today that is real, serious and probably not getting the attention it needs: Lack of Awareness.

Amidst this firestorm of innovation that is the IoT, world altering products and services can only benefit those that know about them.  That seems like a simple comment from some really boring Marketing 101 course at the community college, but it's true.  You can create the greatest IoT product or service the universe will ever see and still go out of business.  So back to the Rolex/Apple Watch situation.  

For the 2 hour flight back to Las Vegas I kept thinking about how huge the sacrifice was to remove a piece of art from a wrist in order to attach a rather pedestrian watch in it's place.  Granted, that pedestrian watch does some really cool stuff but still, it replaced a Rolex!   I have spent a great deal of time this past year researching and speaking with many companies in the IoT ecosystem and knew about a product that would put the Rolex back on that business owners wrist.  The product is called LINK from Wearatec (www.wearatec.com) "The World's First & Only Smart-Clasp".  LINK replaces the clasp on your watch band thus providing full smartwatch capability with ANY watch you choose to wear.  You might ask so how large a market could Wearatec be going after?  In 2014, it's estimated that the luxury watch market (over $ 4,000) sold over 2.7 million watches while the middle range watch market ($ 1,000 - $ 4,000) sold an estimated 3.4 million watches.   That's a nice sized market to be going after and it repeats EVERY year!  So Rolex, you're back in play!!  Yes, I did email this information and, hopefully, next time I see him that Rolex will be back on his wrist.  

But I only found this product because of my Twitter account (@buildingtheiot). Wearatec had begun following me.  As I do with everyone who follows, I wanted to learn about who they were and what they did.  I was so blown away by what they have created I've been talking about them ever since.  And this is a textbook example of the power of social media to help promote a company.  But with the great push to develop products and services in the IoT space, many of these companies (and I am not say Wearatec is one of them) are putting too little effort in driving awareness beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Many of these new IoT companies are packed with brain power that is engineering solutions but those same people are pulling double and triple duty on the sales, marketing and business development sides as well.  These are engineers, technicians and programmers who are also trying to develop branding, strategic partnership, marketing program, do sales and business development while attempting to keep the social media pipeline rich with content.  Unfortunately, that's not the best organizational structure nor the best people to promote both within the ecosystem AND everywhere else.

Companies of all sizes need to market, to promote who they are, what they are doing and why their new idea will become the next "need" in the market.  The same level of focus and effort must be placed on developing and implementing a solid marketing and branding effort as on the actual products and services. Failing to have a balanced effort on this side could end up wasting all that innovation.  These companies MUST invest some of their venture funds into hiring the right people to build the marketing, branding, sales and business development part of the business.  This must be done in consort with the technical side.  Implemented together you create a very powerful go-t0-market strategy that will insure that the world knows that you are going to change it!