Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 336 pages
- Published by: Harvard Business School Press June 2003
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1578516730
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1578516735
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Book Dimensions:
9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
- Weighs: 1.4 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
When, in 1999, journalist Kemper started following the efforts of Dean Kamen to invent a new type of transportation device, he could hardly have known the story would turn out to be at once enormous and tiny. Kamen, inventor of the Uber-hyped Segway (a two-wheeled scooter with an impressive self-balancing system), was already wealthy from earlier inventions (e.g., portable dialysis machines, drug-infusion pumps) when he set his boutique engineering firm to work on the Segway (or "Ginger"). Shrouded in secrecy from the beginning, the project quickly took on a messianic quality, with Kamen proclaiming Ginger would be the primary mode of transportation in a decade. The combination of a cool, mysterious new toy with the timing of the late years of the Internet gold rush created a venture capital feeding frenzy, with figures like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos clamoring to be a part of project Ginger. Kemper's rigorously fair-minded book, which gives all due credit to Kamen and his team, also records Ginger's endless delays, brought about by what he casts as a mixture of Kamen's egomaniacal hubris and his company's inability to think in practical terms (the project was shockingly far along before anyone considered what state regulators might think of the new vehicles that would soon vie for space on sidewalks). The last act is well known. Kemper's book proposal gets leaked and a media circus swirls around the secret world-changing project, only to collapse in a welter of "That's it?" disappointment. The result is a book that is eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
New York Times, June 8, 2003
Kemper used his access well to write a fascinating account of the messy process of invention
Reader Reviews
I don't own a Segway, but I find it (and DEKA) interesting from an engineering perspective. This book is a largely non-technical view into the process of creating it. Is it a good read? Yes. Would I recommend it to others interested in the topic? Yes. Could it be improved? Yes. I wish it were more technical, which seems to be a reasonable request since the readership should be largely engineers and business people, not a general audience. It also needed a section of photos and/or diagrams of Ginger as the engineering progressed and to illustrate various features discussed in the book. (For example, the handle is described as W-shaped and then it becomes redesigned as M-shaped, but it wasn't clear if that was from the perspective of the rider or looking at it head-on.) I also thought that the writing was awkward in places, and found the few transitions from third-person observer to first-person participant to be jarring. I do recognize that the author's presence was key to those few events, but it was jarring to the flow of the page nonetheless. So, overall, I liked it, but given that it will probably be the only book on the topic, I wish it were better...
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