Dean Kamen, DEKA Research and SlingShot

“We could empty half of all the beds in all the hospitals in the world just by just giving people clean water.” 
Dean Kamen in Slingshot

Recently, I watched the 2014 movie entitled SlingShot on Netflix. This documentary chronicles American entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen’s (1) and his firm, DEKA Research and Development Corporation’s (2) 15-year efforts to develop and market his “SlingShot” water-purification system (3). The film also touches on some of his other inventions including the Segway Personal Transporter (4), iBOT Wheelchair (5) and HomeChoice portable dialysis (6). Overall, I’d give the 97 minute movie a 3 out of 5 star rating. The documentary highlights many of the challenges of innovating (7):

Strategic:

• Creativity is an important component of the innovation process and should be fostered within the work environment. 
• A portfolio approach is necessary for successful innovation as no single “great” invention is sure to be successful in the market. 

Technical:

• Prototyping is a valuable part of the process as it allows you, the team and even potential customers to visualize and experience the product or service.
• Continuous experimentation and testing are critical to the development process. It is from successful as well as unsuccessful (some would call failed) experiments that the most learning and hints at the way forward are obtained.  

Commercial:

• A commercially viable product, service or even business model must solve a real problem whether realized by the customer or not.
• The final offering must deliver significant value to a customer/market segment. Not only does it need to solve an important problem, but it also has to achieve that: as well or better than than the competition, at a reasonable price (and cost to manufacture), in a form that is sufficiently easy to use, with an acceptable level of support, and at an acceptable size, weight and level of quality (durability, robustness) among many other factors.

Operational:

• The innovation process benefits from teamwork as everyone has different skills and experiences to apply to this creative challenge and problem-solving activity.
• Similarly, collaboration with outside firms and individuals is also valuable as they too can bring different skills and capabilities to bear.

Financial:

• Innovation with its technical and commercial risks, the importance of a portfolio approach as well as the required experimentation and setbacks (failures), demand that a sustained, long-term investment be made.
• Innovation is still business, not gambling so the appropriate risk to perceived rewards ratio must be frequently reviewed. It’s tough to kill projects, but it often needs to be done to make room for new ones with a better probability of success.

Execution(al):

• The innovation process is always much slower, tougher and more costly than initially anticipated.
• In order to get through the inevitable setbacks, you need maintain your passion for the ultimate vision and its value to your customer.  

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Duncan Jones, Hexagon Innovating (2015) is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

1) I have always been intrigued by Dean Kamen. I met him at a conference in Philadelphia where he was a keynote speaker around 2001 or 2002, soon after the launch of the Segway. At that time, I was also fortune to demo the Segway.

2) DEKA was founded in 1982. It’s mission is “to foster innovation.” I tracked their inventions over time as a the IBOT was a competitor to the “Nimble” power wheelchair that the early-stage fund I managed had invested in. Similarly, the HomeChoice dialysis unit was similar to an opportunity that I evaluated on two separate occasions.

3) The underlying technology of the SlingShot water purification system is distillation of water (boiling it to create “clean” steam and then cooling it back to clean water). This is done in an efficient manner using computer controlled vapour-compression evaporation.

4) The Segway is the famous two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter that was backed by all the famous CEO’s in Silicon Valley and was launched in 2001 with incredible marketing fanfare. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be the success that was anticipated. Ironically, it was the predecessor of the various so called hoverboards that were launched in 2015 coincident with their prophecy in the 1989 movie Back to The Future II.

5) The iBOT is a power wheelchair that, with gyroscopic technology similar that in the Segway, allows it to rise up on two wheels to bringing seated occupants up to eye level as well as allowing it to climb stairs. Again, the product, launched in 2003, has not been very successful as there are “unreasonable” (stability-related) risks of injury which resulted it being classified as a Class III medical device as well as it being expensive ($25,000). It was licensed to Johnson and Johnson and discontinued in 2009. There are rumours of a new Class II categorized version that could fair better commercially.

6) The HomeChoice portable dialysis unit which was licensed to Baxter for automated, home peritoneal dialysis for severe, chronic kidney disease and launched in 1994 has been a very successful product line.

7) The six tenets of Hexagon Innovating are used as a framework to outline these challenges.