The automotive industry is known for slowly evolving its vehicles over time. Every year, automakers unveil “concept cars” at major auto shows around the world. These one-of-a-kind creations are meant to represent the future direction of the company and never fail to provoke envy and comment. Aside from stylish vehicle bodies, a lot of the main attractions in concept cars come in the form of advanced features and capabilities that promise to inform, entertain and protect you in new ways, many of which evoke an emotional response that has us reaching for our wallets.
But when the actual next model of that vehicle is released to consumers, it is not even close to what was presented. The actual cars seem stripped of all the fancy features and visual flair of the concept cars, making them hardly any different from the previous generation. Why is that? Car manufacturers have had over a hundred years to refine their processes and the result is a highly efficient system that creates amazingly safe and feature rich machines at a reasonable cost and, therefore, radical change is rare.
Of course, an incremental strategy is a crucial driver for business efficiency and sustainability, but if you only use incremental innovation and nothing else, you may lose your edge, so ultimately it is not enough on its own merit. Think of it like ascending a hill versus taking a helicopter to the next peak. Incremental innovation tries to reach the highest point on the current hill while a revolutionary approach seeks to leap to the highest elevation.
When Knightscope launched its K5 Autonomous Security Robot (“ASR”) in 2013, it was by all measure radical and, like the automotive industry, the Company committed to embark on a quest for continuous improvement with the team constantly seeking out ways to maximize quality and efficiency in every aspect of the organization, from work processes to how they use equipment or even disposing of waste.
We all recognized that whenever one launches a new business, product, or service, there will always be unanswered questions, though. New concepts always need more changes, and minor tweaks are normal in the early stages as the Company tries to optimize the concept, but we knew we wouldn’t get far in our business if we didn’t know our audience intimately and develop an ongoing thirst for fluency in the challenges they face. Even a small change to our existing product could cost us sales and client loyalty if it’s not aligned with our end-users’ expectations, so we proceeded incrementally as we learned.
For these and many other reasons, we endeavored to construct an open feedback loop with our clients. Over time, this morphed into what is now a key functional area of the entire organization – the Client Experience (“CX”) Team. Now before implementing any changes, we were able to conduct research to understand what improvements people wanted and gather feedback in multiple ways including online chats, quarterly business reviews/interviews, and focus groups.
Communication became imperative throughout the innovation process and as we engaged with our clients, we collected more feedback and improved our understanding of their pain points with our products and services. These insights helped us learn how to develop our models in line with their vision to improve their overall experience over time making small changes along the way similar to software versions – iterating our way through 4 generations of the K5. But sadly, the fourth generation of the K5 simply did not work out and was never placed into production. The team’s knowledge, advancements in artificial intelligence (“AI”), and sophisticated updates in hardware were outpacing our ability to keep up and the continuous cycle of testing and pivoting allowed us to refine our business model, the products and our service by retaining and iterating on only the best ideas, which led us to embark on another revolutionary release – the fifth generation K5 ASR.
The K5 is Knightscope’s flagship ASR capable of both indoor and outdoor deployments. For the past 9 years, the K5 has successfully navigated parking lots, parking structures, corporate campuses, schools, hospitals, transportation hubs, casinos, malls, warehouses and many other locations across the United States with absolutely no human intervention, keeping people safe at the places they live, work, study and visit. The fifth generation K5 is a ground-up design that draws from the nearly 3 million hours of field operations with real clients that have leveraged the technology for real results. Among the targeted improvements were:
Ultimately, any new concept development must accurately reflect the needs and desires of our clients. If our big change was off-the-mark, we knew it could turn clients away. With the relationships we had established, we worked with several existing clients with real challenges to build confidence in the incredible opportunities we had with a radical redesign, and there were many.
When the new product was complete, we began field testing it with our clients and closely monitored its performance. The data quickly confirmed that the benefits were well founded, and we made the right decision to take the radical versus incremental approach. At the end of the day, innovation leads to results and keeps the business growing, so we took the next step and boldly began rolling out the new machines across the fleet in order to surprise and delight our clients – something that could only be done with a Machine-as-a-Service (“MaaS”) business model. It allowed us to begin phasing out all previous generation ASRs by conducting machine ‘hot-swaps’ earlier this year following the final engineering release of the fully redesigned K5v5 ASR. Knightscope was able to elevate the delivery of public safety tools to its clients, strengthen on-site performance and reliability, and raise client value and overall satisfaction.
Stay tuned for more updates and success stories as we continue to innovate and elevate our services, or connect directly with one of our consultative experts today.
