I gave a talk about this at Future Everything last week. As usual the shape of the talk only really came together an hour before (this drives conference organisers nuts) and I thought I’d write it up. If you come to IOT Forum in Cambridge or Thingscon in Berlin you can ask me about this some more.
The dust has settled after an eventful start to 2014 (CES was full of #iot, Nest’s acquisition, SXSW and last week’s OR acquisition) and it’s time for the Milan furniture Fair (which I used to go to when I lived there and in the Tinker years). You couldn’t find an event less in touch with what’s happening in the world of connected products: chairs, ceramics, tables, lampshades. Design in those circles is as artform catering to a rich clientele where the highest form of self-aggrandising for a designer is to complain about technologies they weren’t involved in. None of those products are connected and most of them are designed by professionals with no interest in the internet as a transformative space or set of technologies and principles. It’s a shame because whatever conversation could have happened between product designers & technologists has now been made redundant. In 2014, we are experiencing a new era of product development, what I’m now calling Gonzo Products.
What is a Gonzo product?
– Born on a crowdfunding platform The team of people working on the product exists solely for the purposes of catering to the campaign’s needs, not necessarily to create a bigger business or more products.
– Raising the money it needs to look successful, not the money it needs to make it. Lots of smart products on crowdfunding platforms are trying to look successful to investors first, not necessarily raise the money needed to make the product viable. Any product looking to raise less than £50K to manufacture a product from scratch is basically either very well supported with existing partners or catering to a completely different audience: investors. This is counter-intuitive as crowdfunding was initially developed to help support the early stages of a project. In this case Gonzo Product teams are using crowdfunding as a marketing, market research & finally market validation tool. It’s easier to find angel funding if you’ve got a successful campaign than if you don’t which means crowdfunding is a new way for investors to manage their deal flow for hardware startups.
– Not businesses, projects. Gonzo Product teams will potentially only ever work together to achieve one product only and disband after (see Air Quality Egg).
– Selling the #iot dream, not the reality. Most very high profile Gonzo Products primarily show what the internet of things can be and should be. Selling the dream, not the realities. This is problematic as making a product people can buy, that can be supported and is sold in John Lewis should be the real criteria for success when it comes to #iot. Most gonzo products will be closer to design fiction than they will be to commercial reality and this might influence investors, journalists and other entrepreneurs in the same space but more importantly consumers.
Is this good or bad? I don’t think it’s either. It’s a new product and business space. How much power will Gonzo Products have on the way in which the internet of things develops this year? Plenty. But people like me who are keen to make real businesses and products just have to hold on and learn from them.