The Strategy Pathfinder: Extra Live Cases
The Strategy Pathfinder: Extra Live Case - Chapter 7:8
“Emergence”
Stephen Cummings
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In the 1970s, senior executives of the Japanese manufacturer Honda decided to investigate the possibility of entering into the US market for motorcycles. Their detailed strategic analysis and research extrapolations of the US market led Honda to leave behind the little bikes it produced and sold in Japan (American motorcycle riders rode much bigger bikes) and develop bigger American-style bikes for the US market. But Honda’s big bikes flopped. American motorcyclists could already buy big bikes: American companies like Harley-Davidson, that enjoyed great customer loyalty, produced them. Honda was about to pull out of the US but then people who had never thought about riding a motorcycle before started asking Honda’s couriers where they could get one of the little 50cc bikes that they were riding around US cities to make deliveries. (Honda had shipped out a small number of these Japanese-style bikes for its employees but had no intention of selling them in the US.) After this news filtered up the company, however, Honda decided to take a final crack at the market with its small bikes. People who were not traditional motorbike riders could see themselves using this much smaller, more fuel-efficient, and less intimidating mode of transport. Once these new riders were introduced to motorbike riding by Honda, and gained confidence with them, opportunities began to emerge to sell them bigger bikes. And, over time, Honda established itself as the leading motorcycle brand in the world’s biggest market.
3M’s most famous product – Post-It Notes – did not come about through the senior management team and its advisors doing an industry analysis or finding out what the gaps in the market were. It emerged in the mind of a research scientist who took advantage of the long-standing 3M policy of allowing research staff to spend 15% of their time on developing their own ideas and projects. In this time, the researcher in question had been experimenting with glues, unsuccessfully (they didn’t stick very well). However, a bit of lateral thinking turned the failed glues into Post-It Note prototypes – and the rest, as they say, is history.