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”:
The Segway failed because, unlike e-scooters:
- It was wildly expensive.
- It made people look dorky.
- 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”
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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