XplanaZine

“Build it and they will come!” This is possibly the most dreaded phrase in the world of project planning, product development, and marketing.

In developing or “emerging” economies, I have admired walls of canned fruit, processed just before the brand-new, latest-model western machinery stopped working — fried by power surges or paralyzed by a lack of spare parts. It’s sad to see expensive equipment reduced to the equivalent of a Duchamp sculpture or a Brutalist-inspired housing project in London.
Sadder still is to observe lemon trees with limbs bent to the point of snapping under the weight of rotting fruit because the old reliable wooden box-builder died and looters got the forklifts when the factory was privatized. The story is always the same. The owners of the factory obtained a loan. They bought equipment — not useful equipment, but “prestige” equipment.

“Build it and they will come!” Tell that to the fruit canning factory. They’re still waiting…

“Build the market first, then build the product.” On the surface, this seems to be a sage counter to the Field of Dreams model.

But is it? Are they words of wisdom? Or, is it just a way to jump right back into the box? ( that same box one finally learned to “think outside of.”)

E-learning, Internet architectures, and new visualization technologies make a good case for a return to the Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” model. In these cases, the tools almost determine the applications. The applications are unimaginable because they are a function of the tools.
In fact, sometimes the application is 90% the generic tool, 10% the unique use / modification of it. It’s all about creativity, envisioning possibilities, and doing old things in new ways, or new things using nitrous-oxygen-injected older things. Who knows what you can build if you can just get your hands on the latest tools?

These thoughts flowed out in response to a recent e-mail conversation with Theo Mayer, President and CEO of Panoram Technologies, makers of the state-of-the-art 3D visualization and virtual reality systems. One of my favorite Panoram products is their Digital Imaging Table (DIT-1), often used in resource, people, and product management situations such as resource management, emergency response, forest fire response, logistics, and more.
Mayer suggests, very prudently, that one should stay application-oriented: “It should start with exploring the mission objectives, and only then the technologies.”

Mayer makes sense. After all, a return to conservativism and a hesitance to develop products without a clear use, market, or solid business plan is normal in the wake of the dot.com collapse. What Mayer advocates is a wise, “appropriate-technology” approach. Normally, I’m in complete agreement. Certainly, when faced with a wall of canned fruit and surrounded by rotting lemons, I would say, “Buy boxes and forklifts.”

However, that’s a solution for yesterday. It may work for a few moments today. Will it suffice for tomorrow? I doubt it. The “business” is not so much in production of the primary product, but in the “value added.” What is the “value-added” element? Where do we get it? It’s easy. We get it from our minds.

Just because we can’t think of an application yet doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in cutting-edge equipment, technology, or infrastructure. Granted, it’s important to plan the purchase and buy spare parts and have technical assistance when needed. Building in redundancy and safety nets will help keep the system functional. The conditions will be right for thinking in effective, creative ways, and for the development of new products and services.

The classical economist, David Ricardo, held that the source of true wealth is agricultural production, or, as he put it, “corn.” When corn is planted, grows, and is harvested, new wealth is generated.

In a digital age, we plant and harvest ideas in a field of technological possibility. Sure, it may not rain, the sun may not shine, and the workers may go on strike. Risk exists. But, without “corn” we enter into a very negative situation that results in a cannibalizing of ourselves and our resources. We can pick the metaphor that suits us best as we discuss the way that ideas, innovation, and “value-added” are developed. But, in the end, it’s a return to Field of Dreams technology.

Even if they don’t come, you’ve built an application you never could have envisioned before. This is our future, our survival, our “corn.”