Is the Sony incubator initiative working?

toio is its latest product

Feeling that the company was churning out stale, if not expected products like improved TVs, cameras, and headphones, Sony, under Kaz Hirai, launched an incubator program that would allow employees to utilize company time and resources to work on concept ideas that might one day turn into real products.

Etsuo Kono from Borneo Bulletin:

Since it was launched about four years ago, 13 products and services have emerged, including the ‘toio’ toy platform that the company unveiled in June last year and for which it began filling pre-orders in January. Toio is the first product for children made by the in-house incubator. Children use a controller to make small cubes equipped with motors and sensors move around on a tabletop or floor. The cubes are a base upon which users can build robots or vehicles, and they can use the moving objects to play action games and do puzzles. Toio is based on a study by Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc and is recommended for children aged six and up. While the platform was still in development, students played with it in a collaboration with a neighbouring elementary school. They tended to concentrate for a long time, because of the platform’s characteristic of allowing users to modify and operate the cubes any way they like.

In the past two years, Sony has dedicated a lot of floor space to their incubator products at CES which is telling how much of a presence this initiative has at Sony. After all, so many of the modern product categories and technologies we utilize daily like GoPro cameras, connected door locks and thermostats like August and Ecobee, and even networked speakers like Sonos have all come from new companies.

All of these units talk with each other while most of Sony’s ‘connected speakers’ still very in compatibility, depending if you bought a 2016 or 2017 model

For Sony, they’ve never been first to any of those markets (which isn’t required to be successful), but they have tried to play catch up quite a few times, chasing down GoPro with their Action Cams, Sonos with their connected speakers, and the entire wearable category with their smartwatches.

Now years later and despite far larger R&D budgets and a global presence, Sony has yet to attain a leadership position in any of those product categories and in the case of competitors like Sonos, they still don’t have as compelling of a product lineup.

But perhaps if these products were imagined internally first and not as a response to competitors, things could be different.

As of March 2017, the company had held nine auditions in which 1,600 participants submitted about 600 entries. New products and services from the programme have garnered a lot of attention among various industries. For instance, the ‘wena wrist’ project proposed that analogue watches could be turned into smartwatches. The employee who proposed this was new to the company, but even they could collect about ¥100 million using a crowd-funding framework established by Sony and seek for it to become a full-fledged business. There is also the ‘Huis Remote Controller’, which allows users to arrange their remote control buttons as they like, and a personal aromatherapy diffuser that contains five different aromas.

Sony Qrio Smart Lock

Having had a chance over the past couple of years at CES to play with many of the products mentioned above, I’ve yet to have that ‘aha moment’ with a single one of them.

At best, they’ve been colorful and wacky ideas like the Mesh and Aromastic and at worst, they’ve been the Sony Qrio Smart Lock which brings little to the home automation game and isn’t even compatible with many of the popular platforms, like HomeKit with Siri, or Alexa, which is expected of such a device.

So is the whole thing actually working?¹

Kaz Hirai

We are encouraging open innovation through greater networking and bringing together individuals from both inside and outside the company. By encouraging entrepreneurship and pursuing unconventional ideas and ventures, we continue to create an ecosystem essential to the development and growth of new businesses.

Then again, maybe the idea is less about finding a breakthrough category and more about changing the internal culture within Sony that helps yield better products in the future and if along the way they get a hit product out of it, all the better.