MAY 2003 BROADSHEET - Crossing the Chasm and Sustaining Growth
The subject of our April meeting was obviously of great concern to many of our members and friends struggling to get into mainstream business from their early start-up positions. Our speakers gave theory, practice and case studies of how to do it which, judging from the follow up discussion, was very relevant to most people's situation. The subject was "Crossing the Chasm and sustaining growth" which has become a byword due to the researches of Geoffrey A. Moore, who showed how the Technology Adoption Life Cycle could be adapted, to better deal with the transition from early adopter customers to the general market place.
Our first speaker, Tony Wilson, is a Strategic Marketing and Sales Consultant for High Technology Industries with vast experience of advising High Technology companies on how to make market strategy. Of course, some people are happy trundling along with academics and others who just want their novel techniques applied to their research and development problems. But to jump to world-wide business requires a completely different mind-set, often a change of management style and managers, and failure to achieve this can be absolute disaster. Amongst many other ideas he advised a campaign of canvassing opinion leaders, such as keynote speakers at technical conferences, to help establish the product as a serious contender in the market, rather than an interesting solution to a particular problem. Contact: wilsonaj@compuserve.com
David Gingell, VP Marketing, Documentum Software Europe Ltd, gave the advice "Think big, start small, execute fast". Documentum specialize in managing unstructured information and were very fortunate in having Roche as one of their early adopters, for whom they saved a million dollars a day by helping them automate their new drug approval processes and thus enabling them to get their drugs to market much more quickly. Documentum is highlighted as a success story in Geoffrey Moore's sequel to Crossing the Chasm, entitled "Inside the Tornado"(pp 22-24). David emphasised the need for the principles to be embraced by the whole company, stressing that Crossing the Chasm is not just a marketing strategy but something the whole company must adopt if it is to suceed. He also gave great credit to the pervasiveness of the internet for their rapid expansion into many disparate fields of information overload, eg. insurance, pharmaceuticals, telecoms and financial services. Contact: david.gingell@documentum.com
Finally we had the inspiring tale of The Technology Partnership, which broke away from PA Technology at one end of Melbourn and established itself at the other end of the village in 1988. Our speaker Dr Gerald Avison was one of the 25 who took the plunge and became their CEO. Gerald was great on serendipity, though we all realized that insight, judgement and confidence deserved most of the praise. Their first foray into supplying automated equipment to the pharmaceutical sector repaid its cost to the customer within three weeks and convinced them that there was a bigger market opportunity there. Projects came about in many ways leading to major customers such as British Aerospace and Hitachi. Even with this sort of credibility the growth of spinout businesses was deliberately financed from retained earnings, without recourse to Venture Capitalists, who might have wanted the proverbial quick buck. The result was slow but sure. Recognizing the Chasm and the mind-set of the main-stream customer became obvious and the management was able to develop the right approach throughout the company. To keep down to manageable proportions TTP has spun off a number of companies in different fields. At spin out these companies typically employed 90 to170 staff and have now each grown to 200 to 400 people. Quite a achievement from the original 25 of 15 years ago. Contact: ga@ttpgroup.com
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