An associated concept as far as the customer expectation trajectory is
concerned is it makes sense
to have the segment at this point in time drawn as well.
And you will see here, the customer expectation
trajectory actually maps onto the center of the bell curve.
Which basically means that the center of the market is the most lucrative market,
if you are focused on the mass market.
But there are extremes on the high performance side and
the low performance side as well, which creates opportunities for innovation.
Now that we have done the customer expectation trajectory and
the associated bell curve of the segment preferences, now it is time for
us to introduce a concept called technology trajectory.
And when you map the technology project tree,
Professor Christiansen drew it as a linear curve, I'm going to draw it as an S curve
to make it consistent with what we have done so far.
And the technology project tree curve follows this S curve pattern.
In the beginning, in the nascent stages of the industry the technology is much, much,
much lower than what the customer expectations are.
Over time it gets better and better and better.
It meets the needs of the customer at some point in time and beware
when you focus here, that means you're also focused on the center of the market.
You have attacked the center of the market or
the mass market appropriately with your strategy.
That's what this means.
And then, it gets better and better and
better as far as technology is concerned because of learning.
And at some point in time, diminishing sensitivity sets in.
Now, you may say, wait a minute.
What does this really, really mean.
Well, if you think about this what does technology
reading much lower than the customer expectation means.
What that means is that let's go back to 120 years and
let's look at the late 1880s when you had the dominant
transportation option in the United States being the horse and buggy.
And at that point in time we had the first cars that came in, and
the first cars that came in in the late 1800's
were not as reliable as the horse and buggy transportation.
But cars got better and better and better.
They're working their technical constraints and
then they got because of learning, they got better and
at some point in time they cater to the entire segment.
So now that we have done the customer expectation trajectory and the technology
trajectory, there are two important aspects that you need to understand.
One the notion of incremental and radical innovation.
So any time you have a jump on
the dimension that the customers value, that is innovation.
And a small jump is what we call an innovation.
A large jump is what we call as a radical innovation.
But these are sustaining innovations because these are happening
on the dimensions that consumers already know about.
And the second and more important aspect here is that in the nascent phases
of the industry, the technology trajectory is much lower than
the customer expectation and this is what we call as undershooting.