Innovations and the market : the communicating organiser

By deploying 30 % of its employees in Research and Development (R&D), Sagem is an unusual organization in the development of new products. Furthermore, in 2001 it was the fourth largest French company in terms of numbers of patents registered. Some of its innovations, like inertial measurement units, or more recently, systems for identifying fingerprints, have acquired new markets. However, there are examples where innovative products, despite being promising and greeted as such by the professional media, have not been as successful commercially as had been hoped This was so in the case of the communicating Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), launched in 2001 and voted product of the year in seventeen countries. In spite of this, it was very hard to sell the tens of thousands which had been produced. Romain Waller describes the circumstances surrounding the launch of the PDA, and attempts to explain many of the reasons for its fall in sales.