Three things that hinder innovation

By Michael Newman, Lead Product Engineer, Launchpad

The other day, while wandering down the aisle looking for cleaning products, I stumbled across an amazing contraption:  Clorox’s bottle with Smart Tube Technology.

No Way!

As you can see, it’s a nice little innovation consisting of a tube that runs up the bottle allowing you to “spray every drop”.

Clorox Clean Up Uses Smart Tube Technology

This is a huge leap forward from the days where all we had was a little tube dangling down inside the bottle. 

When the bottle got low on liquid and you wanted to spray down toward the ground, the spray failed miserably. It would just foam and dribble down your hand. 

When this happened, you would have to take off the spray head and re-orient the little tube manually in order to continue spraying until the cleaning solution was actually gone. Now, with this (seemingly) simple, yet incredibly effective innovation, you  don’t have to adjust a thing!

The question is: Why didn’t someone think of this a long time ago? Other than having your idea carried off by a hawk there are three things that consistently challenge product innovation, no matter the industry:

1. Technology  - does the technology and process exist yet?
2.  Cost – Once the technology exists can you manufacture products at an appropriate cost to   make it viable in the marketplace?
3. Market Demand – Will consumers see the value in the product and make a purchase?

Technology:

As a product engineer, I can tell from analyzing the bottle’s design that from a manufacturing perspective, this is a pretty complex thing to mass produce.  The tube originates on the outside of the bottom of the bottle. It then winds up and enters the bottle near the top so that it can connect with the internal plumbing of the spray head. Based on my experience with plastic molding this took a fair amount of R&D to figure out how to do this in a high volume manufacturing setting.

Smart Tube Cost:

The old dangling tube is the industry standard for  most spray bottles. That technology is undoubtedly affordable given the sheer volume  produced every year. It’s what everyone was using, it’s what everyone knows, it’s cheap…  why change it? Clearly someone at Clorox believed that there was a better way to do things, and took a risk. Which brings us to the third leg of the innovation race:  

Market Demand. Now that a new fancy bottle exists, can the more expensive Smart Tube technology compete with cheaper options?

WDITOT?

Yes, because being able to use every last drop without having to disassemble the bottle is a an obvious incentive to buy this newer design. The innovative tube instantly adds value in a meaningful way to the consumer.

 

Clorox has created a great innovation and delivered to the market a prime example of a “why didn’t I think of that?” (Also known as “WDITOTs”, social media is full of these kind of life hacks, or genius ideas that make your life better).

 

In fact, there is a very good chance that the Smart Tube was thought of before, but the product wasn’t yet ready for the marketplace.  There’s no such thing as a no-brainer. You need the right technology, at the right price, for the right audience before even the best innovations will stick. I can’t wait to be dazzled by the next WDITOT.