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Heavy Lifting
Class project hangs on school kids' strained backs.
Larry Rome, a Penn biologist, spends his days studying how fish muscles work, not pondering balance sheets and business plans.
So when he devised a backpack that generated electricity he wasn't sure how to commercialize it — or even whether he should try. He asked friends on campus for advice, and his inquiries led him to James Thompson, associate director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center.
They met several times — "James is a treasure of insight and information," Rome says — and Thompson decided to bring Rome's idea to the attention of Ian MacMillan, the Snider Center's director. MacMillan, a management professor, is an expert in commercializing innovation and teaches a class for MBA students on the topic called Innovation, Change and Entrepreneurial Management.
In the class, MacMillan presents his students with several early-stage technologies. They can pick one or find one of their own. Either way, they have to devise a plan for commercializing an innovation by the end of the semester. Rome's backpack became a jumping off point for a student project in MacMillan's Spring, 2005 class.
"I want the students to work on an actual innovation project as opposed to a bunch of cases," MacMillan says. "The class is about how you conceive of opportunities for commercializing innovations, how you evaluate them, how you plan them and how you execute them."
It aims to introduce students to a series of tools that MacMillan has developed to aid in this process, including consumption-chain analysis, attribute mapping and discovery-driven planning. [For more of these techniques, see Prof. MacMillan's new book, MarketBusting HERE]
Rome's backpack suited needs of the class — it was unquestionably innovative. It also was just a bit odd. After all, does anyone really need a pack that generates electricity as it bounces up and down? The students would have to figure that out.
The pack appealed to Manny Citron, a second-year MBA candidate. He enjoys the outdoors, and he liked that it was a little wacky and unusual.
"It's a backpack hooked to a shock-absorption system — like a frame with springs on it," he explains. "The springs absorb the energy as the pack moves. The up and down movement is harnessed to create electricity."
The question was who would buy it.
Rome had figured that the U.S. military might. He'd originally been inspired by his conversations with a U.S. Navy grant officer about the enormous packs that soldiers carry into combat. The packs, he learned, are laden with electronic gear that requires batteries.
"I thought, if you walk around with 80 pounds and it bounces up and down, why not use that energy," Rome says. "So I built a pack that suspends the load, the load bounces, and that hooks to a small generator."
Citron and
his fellow students, therefore, started with the military
as a potential market. They imagined that
two other
groups might
like Rome's pack, too:
Backpackers and parents.
Backpackers, of course, would welcome the sense of carrying
less; the pack's
suspension system lightens the load on the shoulders.
Plus, they could use the generator to charge batteries
for, say, their flashlights or global positioning
system devices.
Parents, Citron and his teammates figured, might buy the pack because it could lessen the stresses on kids' bones and backs as they hauled around schoolbooks and supplies.
After doing their research and applying MacMillan's methods, the students concluded that military sales weren't practical, Citron says. "It sounds good in theory," he says. "But the truth is the military already has long-lasting batteries, and they've got even better ones in development." Atop that, soldiers typically go on their daily patrols from bases, where it's easy to swap and recharge batteries.
Besides, selling to the military is fraught with costly hassles and delays. Vendors, for example, have to endure lengthy request-for-proposal and testing processes.
The backpacking market had obstacles, too. Big distributors with whom pack makers have longstanding relationships dominate it. That could make breaking in difficult.
That left packs for kids. It's a growing niche because researchers are increasingly documenting health problems associated with kids, whose bones are still growing, carrying heavy loads. Yet it's a niche where the pack's gee-whiz feature — its energy-generation ability — had no obvious application.
"It's a small market, but it's clearly defined," Citron explains. Only one company of any size competes in it, and that firm doesn't dominate.
Plus, it's a manageable market for a startup. Ergonomic kids' packs are marketed through chiropractors, child-health associations and parent-teacher associations, Citron says. "You could guerrilla market into it."
That, then, became their recommendation: Rome and his company — which he's calling Lightning Packs — should focus on worried parents. "What we recommended was a different strategy than what we might have expected when we started out," Citron says.
But that's where MacMillan's tools led them, and having used those tools for a semester, Citron believes in their power.
"The class is one of the most valuable I took at Wharton," he says. He plans to work as a private-equity investor after graduation and believes what he learned will give him a professional edge.
"If we're evaluating a company, I can look at their innovations and maybe uncover hidden value. I'd be one of the few people who knew what tools to use."
He compares the methods he learned to "a pocket set of screwdrivers," adding, "You might not always need it, but when you do it can be extremely powerful."
Applicability in the working world is something that MacMillan strives for. "Students pay a lot of money to take these courses, and they ought to learn something that they can use in their jobs," he says.
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