Let’s face it: Pittsburgh today has too few category-winning products. But we can change.

There’s a paradox about Pittsburgh. As a business community, our reputation, both inside and outside the region, has been shaped by our history as a major corporate headquarters city, an innovative university research center, and a manufacturer of heavy goods – particularly for big institutional customers. All of those images – even the outdated ones – carry positive associations.

There’s a paradox about Pittsburgh. As a business community, our reputation, both inside and outside the region, has been shaped by our history as a major corporate headquarters city, an innovative university research center, and a manufacturer of heavy goods – particularly for big institutional customers. All of those images – even the outdated ones – carry positive associations. 

But when it comes to our reputation for commercializing, promoting, and actually bringing new high technology products to market, we aren’t even on the map. We are seen as a net exporter of ideas, of talent, and of companies, many of which flourish in their adoptive cities. Technologies created here – and there are lots of good ones – seem to have an unusually hard time gaining a foothold in markets that really make a difference. In many cases, it seems as though their creators don’t even think of these technologies as commercial products. So even though winning major product categories could trigger a whole series of benefits that would energize the region’s economy, we have had far fewer successes than you might expect from an area blessed with such great strengths in university research, technology and business schools.

Peerless professionals

As I discovered, that can be a real problem. For the past 18 years, I’ve worked at producing and commercializing technology products here in Pittsburgh. My last major assignment was with Fujitsu, where I was asked to drive a product strategy for a line of multi-million dollar b2b solutions designed to compete against such giants as Oracle and SAP. Like any professional, I wanted to approach that responsibility with the benefit of unbiased advice from my peers – people like me who had actually taken technology products into the marketplace and discovered what works, what doesn’t, and why. 

However I soon realized that I didn’t have much of a peer network here in Pittsburgh. Part of it was that I mostly worked for companies whose headquarters were elsewhere – places like Cambridge or Los Angeles. So whenever I did contact my peers, I would typically be talking to people out of town. And it wasn’t as though no one else here did what I did. It’s just that they weren’t very visible; they had different titles, they were housed in different corporate departments, they had somewhat different career paths, and they seldom knew one another. 

Of course, there were people from advertising agencies and marketing firms and similar supplier organizations who were eager to talk with me. And some of them were really very bright. But when someone is that eager to sit down and talk with you, it’s usually because they want to sell you something – whether it’s what you need or not. 

There were also trade associations, like the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and networking groups such as the MIT Enterprise Forum and TiE-Pittsburgh. But their focus tended to be on supporting company members or entrepreneurs rather than serving individuals with similar professional responsibilities. Although Pittsburgh had professional associations for a host of other occupations – engineers, doctors, lawyers, public relations people, and so on, there was no organization dedicated to people who did what I did: product strategy and commercialization.

Weaving a net

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone. At last year’s annual networking meeting of the Pittsburgh Venture Capital Association, I met some kindred spirits, including John Zappa, who later joined me as co-founder of the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network. Our goal, then and now, was to build an organization that not only focused on supporting the people who set the strategies to commercialize those products and help them succeed in the marketplace, but also advanced the four elements behind category-winning products. Those elements are: 

• Creating disruptive technologies – products that fundamentally change the behavior of the markets they serve, as distinct from sustaining technologies, which are merely improvements on current products.
  
  

• Promoting the concept of market vision – looking at technology through the lens of buyers, users, and other consumers as an approach to understanding and communicating its potential value in the context of its actual use. 
  
  

• Fostering a culture of risk-taking – of cultivating the attitudes, building a supportive infrastructure, and presenting practical role models that advance the notion of taking bold steps into the marketplace.
  
  

• Establishing and disciplined execution of an integrated product commercialization strategy– tying together the inter-related worlds of product strategy, market development and product development and aimed at the opportunity in the marketplace

What’s next?

As part of that effort, we will take a deeper look at these elements in upcoming articles and our next forum event on September 25, Cultivating Product Category Winners, where a panel of executives from some of Pittsburgh’s potentially next great category killers will discuss what they’re doing to get there.

The event and articles will feature the insights of Chip Walter, columnist for Pittsburgh magazine and technology entrepreneur. Walter will share his views on the central importance of vision and passion to success in our innovative companies, and of the impact of Pittsburgh’s history on today’s regional culture. Walter has gained unique insights in this area from his work as a science journalist, entrepreneur, filmmaker, former CNN Bureau Chief, and business consultant to organizations like the National Geographic Society and Ketchum Inc. He is also the author of two science books, the most recent with William Shatner of Star-Trek fame, “I’m Working on That,” a book that connects the concepts envisioned by Star-Trek more than 30 years ago to today’s research and development that are making these technologies a reality today. Walter will present experiences from his discussions over the years with Nobel laureates and scientific visionaries from NASA to MIT, Xerox PARC to Carnegie Mellon with his own experiences as an entrepreneur, writer, and veteran of several startups, to explore how a clear, creative vision is the first step in transforming ideas and dreams into a hard reality.