ICE and the Chasm

5 September 05

       Bob Brotchie, a paramedic with the UK’s East Anglian Ambulance Service, had an intriguing idea in May 2005. If you had an “ICE” listing in your mobile telephone’s contacts list, for “In Case of Emergency”, then a paramedic would know how to get hold of someone important to you in case you were disabled.

As he described it:

I was reflecting on some of the calls I've attended at the roadside where I had to look through the mobile phone contacts struggling for information on a shocked or injured person. Almost everyone carries a mobile phone now, and with ICE we'd know immediately who to contact and what number to ring.

ICE – In Case of Emergency

The ICE listing had great appeal to Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone provider.  They used their annual Life Savers’ awards, a set of major events aimed at celebrating heroic acts, to publicize the idea. 

It may have some commercial potential as well.  A company called EAN Europe, Ltd, has trademarked this particular usage of the three letters ICE.  There are lots of news stories about ICE, but no information yet on how well it’s caught on.

ICE came to my attention because we’ve re-named our update – as of 29 August, we’re now the ICE Update, rather than the IBA Update.  Charlie Brez, of 9 Sigma, responded to last week’s notice about our name change by sending along the story of the ICE phone listing.

Before Charlie’s email, I hadn’t heard of the ICE listing.  But when I read about it, I immediately put an ICE listing in my mobile phone book.  Why not?  There’s not much cost to doing so, and a small probability of a large potential benefit.

But there’s more to the relationship of ICE and innovation than a coincidence with the name of our Center, or as an interesting mobile phone innovation.  The success or failure of the ICE listing itself can be a real-time test of the two different views of innovation success I discussed last week. 

The two views imply two different predictions for the fate of this particular innovation:

Some people feel so strongly about this that they want to bring the government to bear – a California State Assemblywoman, Nicole Parra, for example, wants the state to pass a resolution encouraging Californians to list emergency contacts under ICE.

Even though I adopted the innovation, and put a listing in my mobile phone, my thinking lies more with the “chasm” than the “mousetrap.”  There are undoubtedly a few “better mousetrap” innovations, like the telephone answering machine, that compel consumer purchase based on their benefits.   But my guess is that the ICE listing is not one of them. 

My prediction: this innovation will disappear into the chasm.  In a year, the ICE listing will exist on fewer than 10% of all mobile phones in the US and the UK.

But my predictions have been wrong before.  Let’s see what ICE looks like in the summer of 2006.

More Information:

1. The origin of the ICE Story, as reported by the East Angian Ambulance society.
2. Charlie Brez is the Sr. Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Nine Sigma.  Here’s a link to the nine sigma website.
3. If you want to license the ICE name, you need to talk with these folks:  http://www.icecontact.com/
4. California Lawmaker urges adoption of ICE contact system:
5. USA Today story on ICE 15 Aug 05
6. My most recent mea culpa came with the Gillette Mach3 Power Razor, which I thought would be a loser.  I was wrong.