The discussions of why and how technologies catch up never cease, and they always have in common that they are based on how difficult it’s to foresee the future. I disagree with them all: it’s very easy to predict technological success. If you know exactly how.

Start with this little remark by Steven Chu, US Energy Secretary, stating the necessary conditions for the success of electrical vehicles: “A rechargeable battery that can last for 5000 deep discharges, 6–7 x higher storage capacity (3.6 Mj/kg = 1000 Wh) at 3x lower price will be competitive with internal combustion engines (400–500 mile range).” First, a real exercise of honesty for a government official: I hope it did mean that no subsidies were given to sub-optimal technological proposals. But more importantly, he offered some quantifiable  pre-conditions for the acceptance and diffusion of an emergent technology, mixing technical variables with economic ones.

This line of thought reminded me of some of the most brilliants annotations in Edison’s Notebooks (Notebook Nº3, pages 106–108; Notebook Nº6, pages 11–12; Notebook Nº9 pages 40–42): he combined cost considerations to reduce the amount of copper and the price of high-resistance filaments, with scientific reasoning using Ohm and Joule laws, to guide their experimentation in the quest of better designs of a full electrical system, and not just the light bulb.

It’s that easy: mix technical variables with supply-demand analysis, some micro-economics and much attention to discontinuities in the marginal propensities to consume in the face of technological change. And this is why pitches to VCs are always so wrong and boring: almost no attention to key economic considerations and full of reasoning by analogy.

Like children, always solve labyrinths by starting at the exit: so early we learn that the end is the beginning.