Driving Backward

Blind Spot
If you've ever had a motorcycle helmet on, you know it's hard to see; particularly behind you. Too bad, because seeing is really useful when you ride on the highway among cars, trucks and busses at high speed. So Marc Barros did what any normal college student in Seattle Washington would have done; he took his student loan money and formed a company with some classmates to put a little technology to work. They attached a video camera to the back of a bike, and connected it to a small LCD display that riders could attach to their motorcycle gas tank. Perfect rear view mirror ? perfect product!

Wrong Turn
Unfortunately not the perfect business. While some great interest among motorcycle retailers was encouraging, sales were generally slow. And a focus on learning merchandising & channel sales didn't seem to move the needle. Interestingly though, Barros started seeing his customers watching their rear view LCD screens doing something he didn't expect. People were not using it for safety; they were using it for fun. People were watching their friends do wheelies or pulling off the perfect knee dragging fast turns.

Lane Change
So Barros and his partners had a chance to take advantage of this surprise. But rethinking the product from the perspective of entertaining video stories, as opposed to safety, meant numerous changes. The camera needed to be 'hands-free' to operate, on a motorcycle, but also wearable on your body, or other equipment, and simple to share the edited video online. With a local design firm, the team completely reinvented itself to focus on hands-free video that was easy to shoot and share online.

Building Speed
With the new VholdR camera, demand accelerated so quickly that the company had to stop allowing pre-orders so their small team could catch up on production. The launch at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show led to their first CES Innovation Award, orders from around the world, and a litany of new ways their customers used the camera. They strapped it to a harness in order to capture their rock climbing ascent; taped it to a football uniform to see game as the players see it; mounted it on goggles to ski an epic powder day.

Entrepreneurial View
Barros gives us a general and a specific view, from behind the camera, of a smart entrepreneur. Generally, he shows us that new products, firms and even markets are often not a function of vision, but instead a co-created result of working with your customers and their real needs. Specifically, he shows the potential for taking advantage of surprise, growing Contour from a dorm room production in 2003 to a booming creative consumer product company, by doing something completely different than intended, as a result of surprise.

Next Journey
But the story doesn't end there. Barros and his team continue to innovate, delivering the first 1080p camera, first HD camera, and the first combination of HD and GPS, all from their insight into customers' desire to simply show their friends what they do. Will their insight prove correct? Maybe ? but that's probably the wrong question. The real question is whether Barros and his team will continue to act entrepreneurially ? creating new products interactively with users & taking advantage of surprise ? or whether their success will encourage them to begin trying to force their vision into the market. We'll only know when we get a chance to look in the rear view video camera. Stuart Read is professor of marketing, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland. Robert Wiltbank is associate professor of strategic management, Willamette University, Oregon.

Publication: British Airways Business Life
Author(s):
Stuart Read

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