The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Other Crash and Burn

By: Pip Coburn

Portfolio/The Penguin Group

Together with his core team from UBS, Coburn founded a firm named Coburn Ventures, an organization that puts its knowledge about “change” to work in the realm of technology, telecom, and media investing. Previously, Coburn served as Managing Director and the global technology strategist in the technology group of UBS Investment Research. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Wharton Fellows Fund and an AB from Brown University. In The Change Function, Coburn explains why some technologies are adopted and why most are not.
According to Coburn, his book “aims to identify the root of crisis [i.e. producing what customers do not want, at least in sufficient quantity] by getting in users’ heads to what they really want–as opposed to running insightless focus groups–and it looks for ways of reducing the total perceived pain of adopting a new way of doing things. In other words, we want to understand the crisis at the adopter level, or specifically how a new offering solves a problem such that the pain in moving to a new technology is lower than the pain of staying in the status quo.” Throughout this book, Coburn examines the level of the crisis with regard to the services a new technology might offer. He also examines the total perceived pain of adoption associated with that new service.
When explaining why certain technologies “crash and burn,” Coburn offers several examples which include the World’s Fair-style Picturephone, the Iridium satellite phone system, interactive TV, the Segway (although not all votes are as yet counted), and Webvan. He suggests why each failed, as well as the lessons to be learned from those failures. With regard to emerging technologies which have “taken off,” Coburn includes the iPod, BlackBerry, and Netflix while noting that to be aloft for a while does not ensure an extended flight. A technology which solves today’s problem may soon be replaced by a new technology or by a better application of a relatively established one. Credit Coburn with a lively and, at times, highly entertaining narrative. He claims to have 14,292 opinions and most of them seem to be in his book. It remains for each reader to determine the significance and limitations of The Change Function concept. It may be flawed but its advocate, Coburn, is never dull.

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