As technology evolves, the motivation for further developing technology is very different. These days, things are not quite going smaller and smaller like they used to. With mobile phones with screens made for gargantuan hands, the focus is now completely different. There is an increasing and tangible focus on the quality of the product. Economies are slow and buying power of an average consumer is going down. No longer will a consumer be happy with a product that just about meets his or her requirements. Good is no longer good enough. Stagnation has forced several multi-million dollar companies to the brink of extinction. Thus, innovation with purpose is the way forward nowadays. The “Build it and they will come” attitude rarely works in tumultuous times like this.
The key to innovation is not just giving the customer what they want, it is also making the customer want something. One of the key examples of this strategy is Febreeze. Believe it or not, P&G’s flagship deodorizing product when first launched in 1993 had a lot of difficulty selling. When the marketing team realized that people grew accustomed to the smell of their own house and thus only used Febreeze to mask noticeable horrific smells, they started their revised ad campaign as well as added scent to their formula. They then showed Febreeze being used as a mist at the end of cleaning rituals to make houses smell a certain way. Similarly, Axe body spray has been making boys locker rooms smell like a cacophony of scents since 2003 due to their revised ad campaigns that convinced teenage boys that Axe was analogous to a human pheromone. The most noteworthy example of this is the iPad. The iPad, whether you like it or not, spawned a new generation of computing devices that has for the first time in decades threatened the sales of the personal computers (leading to a sharp decline in sales).
These days, another huge motivating factor for the development of technology is efficiency. Now, with up to eight cores of raw processing power in some computer chips, there is a huge momentum towards making more efficient chips. Intel, the biggest maker of processors for personal computers, has adopted this drive for improved efficiency and has been committed to it since 2007. Recently, however, a relatively new player to the war, ARM, has been making huge progress in part to the energy efficiency of their microprocessors (thus lending a healthy battery life to portable yet powerful devices) and Intel has been forced to further develop their low power line of Atom CPUs at a much faster rate than originally planned. Another great example is the Toyota Prius. The energy efficient hybrid vehicle has saved millions of customers several millions of gallons of fuel. The long term savings and the constantly rising price of fuel have now motivated customers looking to own an affordable car and several other competitors such as GM and Honda following suit.
With the breakneck pace at which society moves to the future, a new outlook on technology is required. Over the past couple decades, the idea of disruptive technologies is increasing prevalent. Disruptive technologies have driven many a stable company into oblivion. The ironic saga of the digital camera is testimony to that fact. The basis for most modern digital camera is an electronic component known as a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) invented at the Eastman Kodak labs. Unfortunately for Kodak, their business model (akin to the business model of Gillette) relied more on the refills for film than on cameras. Hence, they were not too keen on further threatening their own revenue by developing this new-angled device. This move proved to be costly and in 2012, after 123 years in existence, the Eastman Kodak company filed for bankruptcy. It is thus necessary to recognize the transient nature of products presently in the market and to engineer things with the idea of change designed into the system.
Thus, in modern times, several of methodologies used in the past are no longer relevant and present methodologies are going to become obsolete soon. It is necessary for a successful engineer to acknowledge this and recognize the fact that a university education is only the beginning of a lifelong journey of learning.
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