Inventions Waiting for a Market
by Paul McGoldrick
Twice in briefings this week I have been told that a particular technology is "waiting for a market." In one of those briefings the engineer to hand added that it was like the "invention of the laser." I have to challenge that and wonder whether in fact the "waiting for a market" has ever been true for any product.
The idea of the laser was first imagined by Einstein but it was only after Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow invented the MASER (and poor Schawlow rarely gets a mention, these days) was it wondered whether the same could be done with light as had been achieved with microwaves. There was work first reported in the USSR by Alexander Prokhorov (who died earlier this year) which was very laser-like but there was no such name attached to it. Prokhorov was actually born in Australia but his family had communist sympathies and moved to Moscow in 1923 when Alexander was 4 years old; the level of his genius was not seen until he quickly got involved with, and rose to the top in scientific research after he was wounded in WW-II.
Was Prokhorov working on pure science? Of course not, he was working for one of the largest markets that science has known: The military.
The first commercial laser is attributed to Hughes' employee Theodore (Ted) Maiman and he got the patents, but the first LASER - and the man who coined the name - was almost certainly designed by one of Townes' research assistants, Gordon Gould. Gordon Gould may have been working for pure science because the challenge was there, but Hughes did not spend money on R&D without a market in sight, probably again the military.
None of these researchers, I am sure, envisioned the uses we have for the laser today: Those early, klutzy, laboratory-like devices spawned a new industry, optoelectronics, and we probably all have two to six lasers working daily in our houses. But, at the same time, these men did understand that lasers could probably be used for communications (like moon-bouncing) and the more power that could be generated the more likely they could be turned into weapons. Indeed, even with low-power laser pointers, aircraft, passengers and crews have more recently been endangered by "pranksters" blinding pilots.
In a generic sense I have never truly seen an invention waiting for a market. Most developments are as a result of searching for a solution to an existing problem. And even when you build a better mousetrap they won't come running to you: Sharp's far superior calculators were first but lost out to TI, Sony's Beta recorder was mechanically and electronically a far better machine than VHS, and certainly no-one doubts the performance of the Iridium satellite system. Why did they lose when they were technically superior? They neglected to tell the market they were there and what they could do.
Great products don't sell themselves; technology doesn't sell. Words
sell.