In the past several weeks I have talked to two North American inventors and one investor, all of them complaining to me about either the lack of enthusiasm or outright bad treatment they were getting from the Taiwanese manufacturers they were working with.

I searched my memory - and could not remember hearing stories like this before. "What on earth has happened?" I asked myself. The three people all made a point of saying the Taiwanese managers and employees they worked with were very polite, and some had become real friends. The problem was -- and this is the best way I can put it -- a lack of respect for the inventions, for the new technology!

There was traditional and real respect for the people, but a lack of respect for the intellectual property, the concepts and ideas and, most unfortunately, the new technologies that had been brought to the Taiwanese bicycle industry. What has happened over the past 20 years to create this situation? I am afraid it is symptomatic of a North American and European business illness - NIH Virus.

That's right, the dreaded Not-Invented-Here disease! For years the Taiwanese bicycle industry thought this was the exclusive ailment of their customers from America and Europe, and I am sure many of my Taiwanese friends never thought it would infect their home industry. Unfortunately, like the worst computer virus, NIH has evidently wormed its way into the hard-drives, the brains and the culture of some of brightest and best organizations in the Taiwanese bicycle industry.

The whole of the global bicycle industry is at a critical juncture as we begin this Year of the Dragon. We have great opportunities and equally great challenges. The Internet and E-commerce loom as huge agents of change. Business-to-Business alone holds the promise of quality cash flows, channel efficiency and real profitability! But the outbreak of the NIH disease that I've detected may be a sign that some companies in the Taiwanese bicycle industry have not yet figured out that we can't rely on yesterday's technology to create the bicycle markets of the future.

Referred to as the "Sage of Management" by Forbes magazine, Peter F. Drucker is one of the most respected and widely read experts on business and management in the world. In an article entitled Management's New Paradigms that appeared in the October 5, 1998 issue of Forbes, Drucker points out that "In a fast-changing world, what worked yesterday probably doesn't work today." In this article he argues that much of what is now taught and believed about the practice of management is either wrong or seriously out of date.

Relative to technology, Drucker warns that "the technologies likely to have the greatest impact on a company and its industry are technologies outside of its own field."

Drucker goes on to tell the story of Bell Labs, founded in the 1920s as a part of AT&T. For decades up to the late 1960s, Bell Labs produced virtually all the knowledge and new technology the telephone industry needed. It seems that Bell Labs' focus on the telephone industry was destined to cost AT&T dearly. According to Drucker, "Bell Labs' greatest scientific achievement was the transistor." But because the main uses of the transistor were outside of the telephone industry, Bell and AT&T management had no interest in it, and "sold to all comers for the paltry sum of $25,000."

Companies like Sony, Intel and Compaq are, according to Drucker, "great companies today" because of Bell Labs' "myopia" -- or according to my interpretation, Bell Labs' Not-Invented-Here illness!

Bell Labs and its parent AT&T failed to see that the world had changed and the technological walls between industries had fallen. A good example is the automobile industry that has become increasingly dependent on electronics and computers and computer science.

What's the moral? No one in the global bicycle industry can afford to rely on what worked yesterday - because what worked yesterday probably doesn't work today. We can't afford to let myopia, or the dreaded NIH disease, infect our thinking or the thinking of our employees, and in particular our product development and marketing people.

Consumers are driven by technology, in some form, in all the markets of the world today. What we need to come to grips with is the simple reality that an understanding of market begins with understanding how consumers distribute disposable income. The bicycle industry has less understanding of this absolute necessity than most other consumer goods businesses. I know this seems like a shift in gears - but it comes back to the same point. What is the technology that will cause more consumers to ride more bicycles more often?

Of the three people who contacted me over the past several weeks, two of them had presented new technology to the Taiwanese bicycle industry. While their products were accepted for development, they were suffering from lack of attention from top management and their development projects were either delayed or not receiving the resources to push them forward.

I told them all that the Taiwanese bicycle industry was different from the rest of the world. I told them that I was confident that there would be a realization that new technology is the foundation for creating the bicycle markets of the future - and that the NIH disease was just a passing 24-hour bug that would be stamped out in no time at all!

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