Why e-scooters, not Segways, are innovative

It’s so obvious, it hurts. Really.

This is something I thought by myself one or two years ago, but never wrote down. Now I found someone who said the same thing but with more data than I had, so here is why everybody, starting from venture capitalists, should read certain “design lessons from the grim fate of the Segway”:

Why e-scooters, not Segways, are innovative /img/segway-dorking.jpg

The Segway failed because, unlike e-scooters:

  1. It was wildly expensive.
  2. It made people look dorky.
  3. It did not solve any real problem that many people already had.

Like, you know, having to travel distances that are too short for a car but too long for a walk. A cheap, portable, easy to “drive” e-scooter solves that problem perfectly. If not perfectly, way, way better than anything like a Segway.

For more hilariously painful, yet obvious details do read the full article, but this is the gist of it, and of much “innovation” of these days:

if you want to do stuff that both matters and makes money, forget “disruption”: just go for “the bare minimum of innovation necessary to create something usefully new”.

Image sources: snapshots of image search for “Segway dorking”