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993 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

Iridium – the imperfect solution to an
opportunity which never existed?77

Iridium highlights the double-whammy danger of

incorrectly defining the opportunity and then selecting, and persevering
with, an unworkable solution.

In the late 1980s, cellular phone technology was in its infancy. Technology
focused on radio towers to provide coverage for a limited geographical
area, the cell. Where there were no towers, there was no reception –
effective operation was limited to a few high-density urban areas.

Legend has it that in 1987, the wife of the chief engineer in Motorola’s
Space and Systems Technology Group refused to go on holiday to the
Caribbean because she feared that she would be unable to keep in
phone contact with her Arizona property company in order to close a
particular property deal. ‘Why couldn’t her husband create a global
telephone system which worked?’ asked Karen Bertiger.

This real-life challenge to Barry Bertiger was extremely timely for
Motorola, a leading player in the satellite and telecommunications
business which was suffering from the down-turn in government defence
spending caused by the end of the Cold War. Bertiger’s boss established
Bertiger and a small number of colleagues in a covert bootleg operation
within Motorola, invisible to other projects competing for limited research
funds and hidden away from general management scrutiny.

The small bootleg group defined the market opportunity as how to
create a global telephone service which worked. They appeared not to
explore or challenge the need for the service to be truly global, available
absolutely everywhere, despite the fact that the majority of the earth’s
surface is uninhabited or poor. Even when the bootleg group turned their
attention to creating a satellite-based solution, the fact that satellite-
based competitor Globalstar retained blackspots over the oceans and
poles and that Ellipsat (a potential competitor) skewed coverage to more
populated areas did not lead them to challenge their global definition.

In addition, their definition of the opportunity was framed by reference
to existing cellular phone systems. This created the artificial constraint
that their solution had to compare favourably to a conventional cell
phone in terms of size, voice delay and overall quality of experience.
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