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“Next to movie stars, some of the sexiest items to be found in South Korea are the mobile phones. Sleek and high tech, Korean phones and other mobile devices were among the first to offer live television, games, music, e-books, user-generated content, mobile blogging and other services to consumers”.

“Korea currently serves as the world’s de facto test market for new mobile content and technology”.

Read Darcy Paquet’s article on Variety.

When working on emerging technologies and “serial innovation“, you end up facing questions such as ”what’s next” or, more ambitiously, “what’s the next big thing”.

Thinking of innovating from a user centric approach, often times, traditional focus group research does not do the job well enough to provide creative answers to those questions. Lead-user research can make a difference though. By working with, let’s say, hard-core users, early adopters and product hackers there is a good chance you can uncover and outline a variety of emerging behaviors and trends, some of which showing a potential for becoming new products or features in advance to broader market adoption:

“The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. They see the potential in existing technology, and push the envelope to get a little (or a lot) more out of it than its original creators intended. They are comfortable with new tools, and good at combining them to get unexpected results. What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them”.

Read Tim O’Reilly’s views on “Inventing The Future”

As shared in a recent post, designers should be brought at the front end of this process. Right now I’m suggesting that this kind of research can get jumpstarted simply by coolhunting. This is one of the research techniques originally leveraged by the fashion industry, now being embraced by high tech enterprises as part of best practices on lead-user research. 

Going beyond just gathering anecdotal evidence, the scope of the research should involve ethnography, which embraces techniques borrowed by the fields of industrial archeology and social anthropology applied to the systematic study of today’s artifacts, focusing on understanding human factors involving usability and consumer behaviors:

“Design, rather than being solely formed by consumer survey results and a designer’s vision, must emanate from an anthropological understanding of the consumer’s physical, cultural, linguistic, and archeological needs”.

Read Kerry Dodd’s article published by the Design Management Journal.

When discussing emerging trends in wireless markets, the streets of Seoul have become a mandatory stop for this kind field research. The city’s inhabitants own a variety of mobile devices, having access to wireless broadband technologies such as EV-DO, HSDPA and WiMax (Wibro), as well as a choice of terrestrial (free) or satellite (subscription based) digital multimedia broadcasting, DMB.

“Researchers are paying a lot of attention to the generation of teenagers in countries such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore”.

Bob Hayward, Senior VP at Gartner. 

Terrestrial DMB has become ubiquitous and is available in Seoul’s subway system enabling commuters to watch mobile television on PMPs, personal media players. However, the main challenge remains business model innovation. Recalling Darcy’s article:

“Satellite DMB firm TU Media (a subsidiary of SK Telecom) has a legitimate business model, charging customers a $12 monthly fee for its services, but has only signed up 1.2 million subscribers to date — about half of what it needs to break even”.

“Unsurprisingly, free terrestrial DMB has been more popular, but the service is bleeding red ink. Each of the service’s six operators are said to have lost between $22 million and $33 million since launching in 2005″.

Interestingly enough, South Koreas often buy unsubsidized handsets and a fair amount of people end up upgrading their phones between 2 to 4 times a year. As an example, what follows right below is a couple of videos describing the KU990 “Viewty”, whose development involved a partnership between LG with Google, enabling user generated content to be uploaded to YouTube without having to use a PC in the process:

South Koreans appear to handle as much mobile content as traditional content, even when they are at home. That’s quite interesting as 90% of households have a wired broadband connection. Speaking of user generated content and social networking, it should be noted that Cyworld is the leading social-networking service in the country and it happens to be one of the oldest and most successful in the world. Frost & Sullivan points out that South Korea is one of the most developed and mature location-based services (LBS with GPS or AGPG, assisted GPS) thanks to an end-to-end mobile eco-system formed by application developers, content providers, supportive network operators and the extensive availability of sophisticated, feature-rich handsets.

I hope this post was of interest to you. If you happen to read my blog from South Korea or have insights on this subject, please send me an email or leave your comment below.

Thanks!!!

José de Francisco  Chicago, 30 September 07  

“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this post: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car. [2] Project Ergofuturo: ErgoTrans (1991 Product Concept). [3] Toyota’s Personal Mobility: MWV Concept. [4] Venture Capital Investment in Web 2.0. [5] Virtual Ventures = Prediction Markets + Crowdsourcing. [6] “Visual Futurist: The Art & Life Of Syd Mead”. [7] Innovative Mobile Phones: Objects Of Desire. [8] The Economist & Technology Review: “Lessons From Apple’s Design”. [9] The Innovation Gap. [10] Mobile Phone Concepts: Egy Studio.