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Source: Process Need 73

and with junctions every few kilometers at which half a dozen roads
meet at every conceivable angle. Accidents began to mount at an
alarming rate, especially at night. Press, radio and TV, and the opposi-
tion parties in Parliament soon began to clamor for the government to
“do something.” But, of course, rebuilding the roads was out of the
question; it would have taken twenty years anyhow. And a massive
publicity campaign to make automobilists “drive carefully” had the
result such campaigns generally have, namely, none at all.
A young Japanese, Tamon Iwasa, seized on this crisis as an inno-
vative opportunity. He redesigned the traditional highway reflector so
that the little glass beads that serve as its mirrors could be adjusted to
reflect the headlights of oncoming cars from any direction onto any
direction. The government rushed to install Iwasa reflectors by the
hundreds of thousands. And the accident rate plummeted.
To take another example.
World War I had created a public in the United States for national
and international news. Everybody was aware of this. Indeed, the news-
papers and magazines of those early post—World War I years are full of
discussions as to how this need could be satisfied. But the local news-
paper could not do the job. Several leading publishers tried, among them
The New York Times; none of them succeeded. Then Henry Luce iden-
tified the process need and defined what was required to satisfy it. It
could not be a local publication, it had to be a national one, otherwise,
there would be neither enough readers nor enough advertisers. And it
could not be a daily—there was not enough news of interest to a large
public. The development of the editorial format was then practically dic-
tated by these specifications. When Time magazine came out as the first
news magazine in the world, it was an immediate success.
These examples, and especially the Iwasa story, show that suc-
cessful innovations based on process needs require five basic criteria:

— A self-contained process;
— One “weak” or “missing” link;
— A clear definition of the objective;
— That the specifications for the solution can be defined clearly;
— Widespread realization that “there ought to be a better way,”
that is, high receptivity.

There are, however, some important caveats.
1. The need must be understood. It is not enough for it to be