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By Peter Longini
The product that Vocollect built its reputation on is a two-way, voice-driven, wireless computer that gives warehouse workers the ability to interface with their company’s data centers hands-free, using only natural speech. Their devices are used by hundreds of thousands of workers on six continents. As a result, the company now has a dominant position among suppliers of the data-capture devices used in assembling orders for shipment at distribution facilities worldwide.
But that same voice-activated mobile technology platform could, at least in principle, benefit worker productivity and safety in other industries as well. Deciding which ones offer the greatest promise is the mission of the company’s three-member New Ventures Unit, led by Amar Kapadia.
“We’ve been through a couple of different markets,” Kapadia acknowledged. “The auto industry turned out to be a non-starter. But the warehouse turned out to be a huge market for us. Then more recently healthcare, specifically long-term care.
“What I’m doing now is the next step,” he said. “We are in long-term care now; where else can we take this? Can we take it to other parts of healthcare, like acute care? There are other markets I’m also looking at. But those are now at the stage where we were with long-term care three years ago.”
Screen Sequence
To get there, a new product or market idea must pass a series of screens. “It goes through several different tests,” Kapadia noted. “The first is a standard elevator story. And we look for some fairly specific things in the elevator story: What’s the size of the opportunity? Is there a person or a group of people who can really benefit from it? Is there a return on investment?
“There are also some issues specific to Vocollect. For instance, does this make use of our core technology components? Does this use the same or similar business model to the one we’ve used over last 20 years? Is this a business-to-business product, since we’re not really interested in consumer-oriented products? Does this take advantage of some combination of software and electronics with human interaction, which is our sweet spot? Does it have some component of voice, which is obviously our strong suit? There’s are eight or nine items we look at early on.”
Kapadia himself is typically the initial audience for these elevator stories, which come from people all across the 350-member company. And if someone is too busy with their day job to develop a pitch, Kapadia’s staff will help out. “At that level, we are not really looking for a lot of commitment, I’m not looking for anyone to spend more than half a day to a day on putting it together,” he said.
Validation
But if the pitch sounds interesting, things escalate. “The next step is that I like to get validation from three or four experts. So, for example, if it were the hospitality industry, maybe someone who runs a hotel, or someone who sits on the board of a hotel – as well as someone who actually does the job at the worker level. Because you want to find out: is the person going to use this? Is it going to be beneficial to the individual user? Is anyone going to buy it if I build it? Is this something viable? Or is it something way out there?
“By the time you find three or four people and set up the appointments and either talk to them on the phone or in person, it might be a couple of months. I typically assign someone on my team to do the research,” he said.
Since the cost of bringing in expert consultants at a very early stage can be quite high, Vocollect looks for expertise elsewhere. “One approach I find that works quite well, at least in the early stages, is talking to universities that specialize in a particular area,” Kapadia said. “Four years ago, when we were just thinking about healthcare, we came across the University of Virginia Medical Automation Research Center (MARC). And doing something with them – especially since they have a university hospital – was a lot cheaper than hiring a couple of consultants with 20 years of industry experience. And we recently partnered with the University of Maryland’s School of Nursing to test some new concepts. We find the specific group or lab or center within the university that’s doing something of interest to us, and we contact them directly. As long as you know what you can expect from them, the university tends to be a good option.”
Field Research
If that expert research input looks promising, the idea continues moving forward. “The next step after we’ve done that validation with three or four experts is to do more in-depth field research,” he said. “Spending half a day to a day with four or five people across different customer organizations, studying their workflow, studying what kinds of applications they use, the organization’s structure, who reports to whom, and so on. It’s a much more in-depth ethnographic study. We use that to build a concept. And the concept can be anything from a slide show to something that’s built to the point where it’s a more an alpha or beta version of the product.
“We start building relationships with beta customers once we have a concept and can see light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “At that point, in addition to a working prototype, you need to have a vision for how it fits into their operation, what kind of benefits it’s going to bring – essentially painting a picture that says: here’s what the future looks like if you use this product.
“From time to time, you come across several different opportunities in one given market,” Kapadia pointed out. “If I find an idea that’s not a radical paradigm shift – maybe just an incremental change and a relatively small market – I sometimes help our resellers develop that idea. We have internal threshold below which we really don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort. But if it’s too small for us, it may not be that small for some of our resellers. So I’ll get some of them to work on it.”
Hang Loose
However, staying flexible is essential in advancing new ideas, according to Kapadia. “Say, for example, that I have this big vision with four or five different ideas. I pick one and say, okay, this makes sense because it’s relatively easy to develop based on what we already have. But then, once we start pursuing it, it doesn’t generate a lot of excitement. I could keep on pushing it, but maybe we should go back to the original list and go with some other idea that people are interested in and excited about, even though it may be harder to pursue.”
But serendipity also plays a role. “It’s part luck, part persistence,” Kapadia reflected. “For example, over the last few years, I had been talking to an early prospect about a new opportunity. They were very good in helping us think the idea through and letting us do research and concept testing at their site. But when we said: okay, can you spend the money to put this in full time, as opposed to just doing a pilot? The answer was, ‘Well, the economy is pretty bad, we’re not sure if we can do this right now.’
“We have a general company policy of not going live with a product for free because there’s no buy-in if you do that. So I was looking for ways around it, and it so happened that I ran into someone there I had met several years earlier. And I mentioned that there was an award coming out for innovation in her field; would she like me to apply on her behalf? She said, yes, that sounds interesting. So we applied with them and they won a cash award for the innovative use of our technology. Despite the economic conditions, the award generated a lot of excitement at the client organization and helped move the conversation around to going live on the new product much faster.”
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