Simplify Results For Management

“Simple can be harder than complex.” – Steve Jobs

Suppose you analyze a market and find four features that help describe a product’s value or sustainable price. Your power form equation reads Price = constant * feature 1^a * feature 2^b…feature 4^d. How can you simplify each expression so that more people can grasp its meaning?

Helicopters (A-C) come in many designs and sizes. You suspect their useful loads, cruise speeds, and the number of engines support their prices. Analysis confirms that, but the resulting equation is complicated. You want to know how noise, or its lack, contributes to prices too. You find data on cabin and sideline decibel levels, but it’s spotty.

You want to be both simpler and more thorough. What to do?

Poring over the data, you find that pound for useful load pound, helicopters with more main blades fetch more money. That’s because rotor systems with more and smaller blades disturb the air less and create less noise. In D, you can take that expression, Blades^d, and depict the projected Value increase as you add blades. Combining D (and like tables for features a-c) with Demand analysis (see the last post) permits fine-tuning against the market’s needs.

#hypernomics #markets #marketanalysis #innovation #future #futurism

Worth Every Penny – Not Enough Pennies

There are several ways to sink a new project.  A common method is to ask potential customers about their willingness to buy an offering and then suppose some fraction of the resulting sum is viable.  In the 1960s, surveys indicated there was a market for 200-300 supersonic Concorde airliners.

They built 20.

Decades later, multiple companies are entering this market again. One of them, Aerion, is building its AS2 bizjet (A), selling for $120M.  Suppose we compile and analyze a dataset of all business aircraft that cruise at 400 MPH or more.  We’ll then find a production possibility curve for planes worth $120M as shown in B (that curve has an adjusted R^2 of 97.5%, a standard error of $10.1M, and P-values of 6.11E-43 and 1.02E-19 for Cabin Volume and Max MPH, respectively).  By this measure, the AS2, over ten standard deviations above the line, is worth every penny.

However, in C, we find that the market only supported 55 business aircraft worth $80M or more for a decade, up only slightly from a like study done for the same duration done five years earlier (with 46 planes over $80M).

Five years ago, Aerion announced an order for 20 units. They have the same number today.

#innovation #markets #future #economics