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Chromatography Today Help Desk It sounds a great idea but…
Tony Edge, School of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, Crown St, Liverpool L69 7ZD Introduction
How many times as scientists have we looked at new technology from a distance and thought how exciting that technology is, but always at a safe distance hoping that it will not impact us. In this edition of Chromatography Today we are looking at new structures and concepts within the field of chromatography and sample preparation. We are often drawn to new disruptive developments in our field and discuss with great enthusiasm the impact that the introduction of a new technology will have on the world of analytical science. This presents an interesting challenge since not all of the technology that is so warmly discussed by excitable scientists actually makes it into the mainstream laboratory and understanding why this is the case may help scientists bring new technologies into organisations in a more effective manner. Interestingly it is not always the technology that fails but instead the approach that is employed by vendors and purchasers that is the downfall of the technology and in this edition of the Chromatography Today help desk, in a move away from a technical article, the concept of how to introduce new, disruptive technology into the market place will be discussed and the implications that this can have on the separation science.
The concepts for the discussion are taken from two sources. The first is an excellent book on the topic, ‘Crossing the Chasm’ [1] and all lab users should be encouraged to read this as it may help to ensure success when the next new ‘shiny toy’ is purchased. The second concept is based on the Kübler-Ross change curve, originally assigned to the different phases of grief, but can also be readily applied to the introduction of new concepts or new technologies [2].
In order to better understand why new differentiated technology is not always readily incorporated into the mainstream laboratory it is first necessary to get a better understanding of the different types of lab users that exist within the scientific field. It is important to have different personalities within an organisation, but it is also important to understand what the roles of these individuals are in bringing in new technologies, whether that be based on new analytical concepts of a new chromatographic structures.
Within any organisation there are the technology enthusiasts and visionaries whose role is to bring new technology in to an organisation. People of this genre are looking at ways to dramatically improve the performance of the mainstream laboratory by bringing in new concepts. They will be very much focussed on the concept and perhaps not so much on the detail of the product offering. This poses a problem for the vendor as will be discussed later in this article. The visionaries represent a relatively small proportion of the scientific workforce, typically 5-10%.
Figure 1: The distribution of scientists can be broadly based on a Gaussian curve, however, there exists a chasm between the visionaries and the majority of the more pragmatic laboratory users.
A much larger proportion of the laboratory population is made up from the individuals that have a routine job to do and where performance is governed not by the number of innovations that are introduced but instead by the number of samples that are analysed. By the very nature of the work that these scientists perform they tend to be very pragmatic in their approach, and the fear of not being able to deliver the sample analysis drives their thinking process. This type of laboratory scientist comprises the majority of lab staff and are referred to as early and late majority. Thus, change is not always seen as a good thing, as invariably it will impact on productivity. The number of people in each group is often presented as a population bell curve and unlike most distribution curves where there tends to be a gradual change from one group to another this is not the case in this example and there exists a chasm between the visionaries and the mainstream lab users in terms of the way they treat new technology and consequently the manner in which they should be marketed and sold to.
This presents a challenge to the vendor of disruptive technology as they will typically be targeting the visionaries initially, since they will be more aligned in their thinking process to the concepts of introducing a new technology, and these will typically be the people that are more accessible within an organisation. Finally, the visionaries will act as the gatekeeps to the rest of the organisation, so it is important to be able to understand how to sell to these individuals. From a marketing perspective, the approach to generating sales is to focus on the innovative aspects of the technology. If the technology is not quite that robust yet is not so important as ensuring that the concept of the technology can be shown to work. Thus, when new disruptive technology is launched it will often have buzzwords such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘exciting’, and ‘novel’ associated with it. For the more
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