Tech Vendors Are Today's Don Quixotes
By Adrian Wright, project manager, ACW Consulting Company
I am originally from the Caribbean Islands, famous in part for their renowned rums. But since taking up long-distance running, I generally avoid alcohol, a diuretic. However, during the winter holidays, I do enjoy a good rum cake. We call it “black cake” in the Eastern Caribbean, and the best bakers know that a good white rum, or strong rum, is the key ingredient. Wray & Nephew Overproof might be popular in Jamaica, but I am partial to Don Q.
Don Q is named after the fictional, if not mythical, warrior figure Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel of the same name. The quixotic knight is known for tilting at windmills, believing them to be enemies. Today, it seems, emerging tech solution developers are embodying the spirit of Don Quixote centuries later.
Introducing The Tech Don Quixotes
As these vendors bring their ideas to the mature clinical research market, they target all those established folks, rendering any and all preexisting ideas as arcane. The market key opinion leaders and their outstretched orthogonal palms with a universal “go slow” gesture are seen by these Don Quixotes as arms of a flailing windmill.
The Don Quixotes then have their backs up and are ready to defend their market entry position with the prototype taken “as is.” Compromise is not an option. They are determined to tell these potential customers that they need to abandon their old ways and adopt their unverified solutions holus-bolus.
Where The Don Quixotes Have It Wrong
District3
Some time ago I took a business validation program. I learned a valuable lesson: Validation is key.
It comes before the solution. It comes before sales and marketing. A customer is not just a person with a business need or a potential lead sitting on a pile of money. Instead, a customer is a person or group who fits the business case of your value proposition and who has the resources willing to buy your product.
A key starting point for many business entrepreneurs and certainly for my education is Rob Fitzpatrick’s founder-centric book The Mom Test: How To Talk To Customers And Learn If Your Business Is A Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying To You. The premise is, of course, that your mom — also family, friends, and those closest to you — are all going to love your idea because they love you and don’t want to hurt your feelings or tell you the hard truth. Missing from that interaction, of course, is objective validation.
Entrepreneurs go through a validation workflow to — sorry for the redundancy — validate their business idea(s) or pivot. In normal parlance, they validate the value proposition — the thing(s) about the undeveloped solution that answers a need or pain point in the market. These value propositions (“value props” for short) answer the question: Why should your customer segment care about this product or solution idea?
Validation is a critical part of the startup journey. In that validation workflow, there is room for adjustment and fine-tuning of the value proposition(s) based on customer insights and feedback. This is where you determine if there is a problem-solution fit.
Yet, the Don Quixote-types tend to miss these opportunities because they are too entrenched in the dodging, parrying, and thrusting of swordsmanship against the windmills. As a result, the adoption cycle is longer or never materializes because, well, these blasted windmills are so darn stationary.
How Quixotes Should Approach Tech Product Adoption
Product Adoption Curve
A typical product adoption cycle goes through stages. Gaining traction with the early adopters will be different and easier than for the more mature sector of the intended market — the prototypical “laggard” segment, and tech innovators would do well to keep that in mind. They should be accommodating to any company willing to test a solution for proof-of-concept. Late and laggard companies might want the implementation to be incremental and go through some pilot and even iterative custom development (e.g., Continuous Deployment/Continuous Improvement).
I often hear tech vendors who want to bring innovative solutions to clinical research talk about making the process faster or more efficient. However, they rarely measure process efficiency from a holistic perspective from the zoomed-out vantage point of the entire clinical research ecosystem. Instead, they are taking a narrow, rather parochial view of what their solution would bring to the sites with whom they may have partnered for user acceptance testing (UAT) or during development of their minimal viable product (MVP).
However, the mature customers tend to have a much more panoramic view of how the technology will fit into the existing operations process. These sponsors are risk-focused and generally wish to mitigate any unnecessary and unproven disruptions to established workflows. Many tech vendors do not keep this in mind. But tech vendors need to be at least risk-aware and ideally de-risk their solution for the mature customer so that it can eventually integrate. The tech vendor’s UAT and MVP customer evidence is limited and generally not sufficient to gain the immediate adoption from the potential sponsor customer segment that many of those vendors would like. Rarely do I hear vendors speak of their blind spots from a single individual node within the larger interconnected research industry.
This de-risked option should be in the go-to-market (GTM) strategy. While innovation is needed and there is notable inertia, not all the feedback should be dismissed as an industry stuck in its old ways. Rather than pushing back against all the feedback, be open to insights to be potential, workable integration points and/or pathways.
Some Parting Advice
Vendors, if you are tilting at windmills, perhaps it would be prudent to check your GTM strategy. Maybe it’s not the perfect product-market fit. Some humility might also be in order. And given the long winter days, so too might be a slice of rum cake baked with the Don Q. Just don't be a Don Quixote.
About The Author:
Adrian Wright is a business project consultant with a blended background that spans clinical research (laboratory pre-clinical, quality control in research R&D), healthcare service management, and technology innovation. His clinical research expertise includes a decade of work in the field at professional training institutions, large multinational CROs and embedded in Big Pharma, working across several therapeutic areas and indications in Canada and the U.S. As a proponent of multi-fluency, projects that blend these three areas and are pushing the boundaries at their intersection are his passion. He currently is a founder and CEO of a startup focusing on helping clinical product development companies better meet participant diversity and representation in clinical trials. In 2023, he was selected for the MIT PE Technology Leadership Program.