Here is something that took me years to understand: when a new technology emerges, the human psychology that drives purchasing decisions does not change. What changes is the business model that best matches that technology to those unchanged psychological needs.
The technology underlying rapid antigen testing existed long before COVID. The science of antibody-based lateral flow assays had been established for decades. What did not exist was a business model that delivered it in a form the mass market could actually use — without training, without clinic visits, without waiting for lab results, without specialist equipment. The technology was available. The model that made it accessible was not.
This is the pattern I see repeatedly across every industry I have worked in. The technology is rarely the constraint. The model is. The companies that win when new technology emerges are not usually the ones with the best technical capability. They are the ones that first figure out the business model that makes the technology's benefits accessible to the people who need them.
What I designed in 2020 was not a new technology. It was a new form factor — an all-in-one pen that embedded the sample collection, buffer fluid and reading strip in a single object that anyone could use without instructions. The innovation was the elimination of steps, the reduction of error surface, the democratisation of a capability that had previously been confined to clinical settings. That is a model innovation, not a technology innovation.
The underlying psychology driving demand was identical to the psychology that had always driven demand for medical testing: people want to know quickly whether they are at risk, they want the process to be simple enough to do themselves, and they want the result to be unambiguous. That psychology is unchanged. What changed was the model that served it.
Every major technology shift in history follows this pattern. The internet was not a new human desire — people had always wanted fast access to information and convenient commerce. The innovation was the model that made those existing desires servable at scale and at low cost. Streaming was not a new desire for entertainment. It was a model that made existing desire more conveniently served. AI is not creating new human goals. It is enabling new models for serving the goals humans have always had.
The profound insight is that business model innovation is the most consistently undervalued form of innovation. It requires deep understanding of human psychology — of what people actually want, not what they say they want — combined with the structural creativity to design a delivery mechanism that serves it better than what exists. Technology enables model innovation. It does not replace it. The model is the business.