products purchase) or indirect, e.g., via centralized funding decisions that reflect public demand. Either way, a market without means is not a market at all The Role of Risk Perception in Market Demand Risk—both actual and perceived - plays a crucial role in determining market demand. If the first threshold an emerging technology must achieve is technical feasibility (he., can it be done?), the next - and often higher—hurdle is safety. In this context, "safety" serves as proxy for a broad range of performance characteristics related to environmental impact and health effects—both episodic and long-term. Assuming that space solar power is feasible from a strictly technical perspective, what has yet to be proven—to the satisfaction of the marketplace—is its safety. Experts may be confident that risks arising from this application of microwave technology are fully manageable, and in feet compare favorably with conventional energy sources; however, the more general population that makes up the market almost certainty does not share their confidence. This disconnect between expert opinion and popular perception has critical implications for SSP, and must be resolved if commercialization is to go forward. Examples abound, drawn from virtually every industrial sector, in which perceived risk - coupled with low reward - has been the downfall of otherwise viable products, services, and technologies. From silicon breast implants to nuclear power plants, Superfund remediation to the Supercollider, Alar to the Audi 5000, the risk/benefit decisions that ultimately matter in the commercial arena are made not by technical experts but by consumers. What are consumers worried about? As these examples, and, more significantly, worldwide regulatory trends, suggest, people are concerned about risk—to themselves, to other people, to environmental integrity, to the global ecosystem—and unwilling to accept, much less demand, what they (not the experts) consider unacceptable. At the same time, consumers' calculations of benefit increasingly include some form of risk mitigation, either with regard to health effects or environmental protection, spurring the development of new products and technologies to meet this emerging dimension of market demand. For example, international concerns about dioxin, and, more generally, toxic use reduction, gave rise to Elemental Chlorine-Free paper, which virtually eliminates dioxin formation by substituting chlorine dioxide for chlorine in the pulp bleaching process9. Similar demand for environmental performance has prompted the petroleum industry to overhaul its entire production life cycle, starting with minimum impact exploration, double-hulled tanker transportation, and pipeline risk management, and ending with reformulated gasoline. Direct parallels exist in the consumer products categories, in which both individual health and safety and environmental considerations are increasingly built into product design and aggressively marketed as a competitive advantage. Products as diverse as low-fat foods, tamper-evident packaging, automobile air bags, and home radon detection devices all reflect underlying concerns about personal risk and offer a means of mitigating it. Other products address a broader agenda, such as "cruelty-free" cosmetics, "environment-friendly" garbage bags, "energy-efficient" personal computers, and "green" laundry 9 Source: the Alliance for Environmental Technology
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