Cyberdyne: A Leap to the Future

Cyberdyne Inc. was a Japanese technology venture founded in 2004 by scientist Yoshiyuki Sankai to commercialize a hybrid assistive limb (HAL). HAL was a robotic exoskeleton system for people who had difficulty walking due to nervous system disabilities resulting from stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI), and intractable neuromuscular diseases. In a person with neuromuscular disorders, signals transmitted from the brain to steer muscle movement are weakened, causing ambulatory difficulty. HAL could noninvasively read faint signals that leaked to the skin surface and amplify them, which drove actuators to assist limb movement. In other words, when a person wearing HAL tried to move his or her limb, HAL assisted the person in moving the limb. As a result, HAL enabled the person’s brain to relearn how to walk, as HAL could reinforce the neurological system’s transmission. In order to sell and promote HAL in the U.S., the world’s largest medical device market, Cyberdyne submitted an application to the Food Drug and Administration (FDA) in November 2014 and eagerly awaited approval.
The case concentrates on the marketing decisions that Cyberdyne has to make to bring HAL to the U.S. market once Cyberdyne obtains FDA approval. The students can consider target-market selection and accompanying marketing-mix elements—distribution, promotion, and price. The case provides students the opportunity to understand and utilize marketing-mix elements when bringing a technologically innovative product to market in a business-to-business context.