Blogs

This is an excerpt a post I developed in conjunction with Mitch Solomon of Aironovo.

—-

Since its publication in early 2013, AUVSI’s The Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the United States has become the gold standard forecast for the commercial drone market, garnering media attention typically reserved for celebrity weddings and babies born to royalty.  Its primary forecast is that the UAS market will reach a whopping $1.14 billion in the first year after the FAA issues favorable regulations and that the precision agriculture market will “dwarf all others.”

The accuracy of these predictions is enormously important. A lot of people – tens of thousands, if not more – have been relying upon them for big decisions like, “Should I leave my job to start a drone company?” or “Which market should my company pursue?”  But commercial drones are not just cocktail party conversation–they are increasingly driving the flow of capital and labor, and impacting many lives in the process.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Recently, however, a growing chorus of industry observers has started to ask questions about the reliability of AUVSI’s findings. This post at Drone Analyst is a good example. These individuals, many of whom are among the true pioneers in commercial UAS usage, can best be characterized as enthusiastic but pragmatic UAS evangelists who don’t want to see unwarranted hyperbole lead to unmet expectations.  Many realize that initially overhyped industries never recover because customers, investors, and employees who were burned in the initial wave of unmet expectations are difficult—if not impossible—to ever win back.  They are passionately committed to the industry’s success and believe that rational expectations are a key part of it.

With no axe to grind or agenda to advance, I [Mitch Solomon] partnered with Colin Snow @droneanalyst to explore whether the skeptics and pragmatists were on to some something.  We felt our combined backgrounds in market intelligence and tech market strategy would give us a reasonable set of expertise to draw upon and would help others form a more balanced opinion of AUVSI’s forecasts.  So over the past several weeks, we’ve been carefully reviewing AUVSI’s report, as follows:

• Compared their research methodologies to what we believe to be best practices in market research based upon our own experience.
• Conducted an in-depth interview with the researchers themselves, so that we could directly ask them questions about their methods and results that were not made clear in the report.
• Initiated a follow-up discussion with AUVSI leadership to understand their perspective on the report and its origins.
• Performed intensive primary research with about 20 carefully selected professionals in the field of precision agriculture to understand their UAS adoption plans, since the report’s findings are almost entirely based upon rapid adoption by American farmers.

We then synthesized our findings into the following five conclusions about the report and its reliability.

Read more here: http://droneanalyst.com/2014/06/25/five-reasons-the-auvsi-got-its-drone-market-forecast-wrong/