Propesa

Gauri Nanda paused to catch her breath. The 27-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) graduate student was in the midst of a P.R. blitz that was unlike anything she’d experienced in her life—articles, interviews, and television appearances that had culminated, most recently, with a spot on Good Morning America, ABC’s erstwhile morning news show. And she wasn’t finished: next on her schedule was a guest appearance on the Today Show, Good Morning America’s NBC counterpart. It was October 2005, and the foreseeable future was looking busier by the day.

The source of all the attention, the result of years of hard work on Nanda’s part at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, was an innovative alarm clock named Clocky (see Exhibit 1 for a picture). Clocky was designed for people who had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. In addition to emitting a repetitive beeping noise like a normal alarm clock, Clocky could jump off a nightstand and roll around the room, forcing owners to get out of bed to turn off the alarm and thereby ensuring a successful wake- up process. With an embedded computer chip Clocky could go in a random direction every morning, in order to keep owners “on their toes” and prevent pattern recognition.

But the flurry of media attention had come at an inopportune time for Nanda. Despite her efforts, Clocky was still only a prototype, one that had come close to not functioning during a live performance on Good Morning America. Buyers were lining up, but by Nanda’s own estimate she was still at least a year away from having the capacity to debut Clocky properly on the open market. Getting there would involve a steep learning curve, from manufacturing and distribution challenges to intellectual property issues. Overcoming these challenges and completing the production of Clocky would bring a slew of new challenges: how to best leverage the PR gained from the media attention to market Clocky, for example, and whether to partner with a large-scale retailer such as Wal-Mart or Best Buy or even to pursue co-branding opportunities with a product development outfit, like iRobot, that could make distribution easier but might require her to relinquish some control over her product.

Looking ahead, Nanda also wondered if, in the end, the rush of media exposure would prove to be a hindrance for her product and business. Would consumers interested in buying Clocky now be frustrated once they learned that the product was not yet commercially available, or would they be content to wait until Clocky reached the market? Should she make any effort to defer the current

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Professor Elie Ofek and Research Associate Eliot Sherman of the Global Research Group prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

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