One of the big problems with technology is the prevalent attitude that just because something can be done, people will find it useful. It’s best seen in engineering-led cultures where there’s a feeling that “all that marketing and usability stuff can be worked out later…man, isn’t this damn cool?” In other words, marketing and usiblity is the easy, common sense stuff that you put in place when you have a neat-o piece of tech.

There’s an example of this that Nicolas at Pasta and Vinegar pointed me to, with Intel’s new, undoubtedly, very clever positioning system. The idea is that a device connected to a network can work out where it is in relation to another device on the network. This gets round the main limitation of GPS, which requires line of sight access to a satellite and which is absent in most offices.

It’s certainly neat-o and doesn’t require a huge investment, as the network is already there. Nice piece of thinking, guys.

But that’s where the idea runs out of steam, as there were no compelling ideas about how to use this at the press conference. The examples they give are just rather boring, quite frankly, such as being able to continue a conference call on your tablet PC when you need a cup of coffee and switch it back to your desktop. Or getting an alert if your dog leaves the yard. Hmmm.

There’s two ways of inventing technology. Firstly, you to look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that’ll solve it. To take an example, when cars were invented, we needed better roads, so the roads were built. No one started building roads in the hope that someone would find a use for them ie that cars would be invented to go on these new smooth, shiny highways.

The other way is to invent something cool and clever and hope there’ll be a use for it. That’s how, for instance, Post-It Notes came into being. 3M accidentally invented a low-tack adhesive (they were looking for a high-tack one) and one of the engineers started marking his place in his hymn book with notes coated with it. The rest is history, as they say.

There’s room for both ways of approaching invention - the planned, marketing led method and the typical skunk works method. But if you do the skunk works approach, you need to go the last mile and work out what the hell it can be used for (assuming anything) and tell people. Otherwise, their reaction is “that’s cool, what’s next?”.

In the same way that marketing and selling needs to translate features into benefits, technology needs to approach things in the same way - and that’s to append the phrase “which means that…” to the pitch. Take this example; “So if we have this really cool way of locating a device on a network….which means that you can grab a coffee during a conference call.” Is this a compelling application? No - let’s try again.

If you’re coming up with cool technology, why not give it a try? “…which means that” is a powerful little phrase.