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Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk

The HP Kittyhawk case allows students to explore in detail why it is sodifficult for established firms to succeed at disruptive technologies.

The Kittyhawk team developed a 1.3 inch disk drive: a disruptive technologyin every sense. From a project management point of view, HP did everything

right. They had set up an autonomous project team, and gave the projectheavy senior management support. The team focused on the emergingpersonal digital assistant (PDA) market, which in the early 1990s wasbelieved to have explosive growth potential. As a consequence the teamcreated a product that had incredible shock resistance and low powerconsumption, and weighed less than an ounce. In terms of field failure it wasthe most reliable product ever introduced in the disk drive industry.

HP created a remarkable new technology, but its targeted market neverblossomed. Just at the end of the case as the clock was running out on theKittyhawk team, Nintendo approached HP with its Nintendo 64 system with aslot for a 1.3 disk drive, and projections that it would sell several million

units per day during the upcoming Christmas season. The problem was thatthey needed the drive for $49.95, and HP had designed the Kittyhawk for adifferent market at a cost of $250 per unit. The 1.3 drive was a potentiallydisruptive technology which could have been designed to a $49.95 pricepoint, but HP had positioned it as a sustaining technology, as nearly aspossible.

Whether a new technology is sustaining or disruptive is often a strategicvariable rather than something inherent in the technology itself. HP took themarkets structure and the needs of the customers it had identified as givens,and attempted to push the technology far enough that it addressed thoseneeds. A very different approach would have been to take the disruptivetechnologys current capabilities as a given, and then find a market which

valued the attributes of the technology which existed at that time. Researchindicates that the overwhelming tendency of successful companies is to try toforce fit a new technology to address the needs of known customers. Often,however, the home run comes when the company discovers or creates amarket which values the very different attributes that are enabled by adisruptive technology.

Here are some additional discussions questions that you may want toexplore:

1. Was the Kittyhawk project a failure? If yes, what went wrong? If not,

why not?2. Was Kittyhawk positioned as a sustaining rather than disruptive

technology for mobile computing?

3. Was the project dependent upon the success (or failure) of othertechnologies, not just HPs? Was HP locked too early into the wrongcustomer (Dayton Electronics)? Did HP try to shortcut the incubationperiod by requiring short payback period?

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4. What have you learned from the case?