The IRI conference attracts Leaders in Innovation from all over the globe to talk about everything R&D. While these companies span a wide variety of industries, many innovators were seeking solutions to similar problems. Seth Miller, Managing Director of Innovation Development at Xinova explains what digitizing means to a slow-moving industry.
You can’t approach innovation without understanding what the goal is, who the customer is, why you’re doing it, and what the path is going to be to market.”
–Seth Miller, Managing Director, Innovation Development, Xinova .
“Getting that visibility all the way to market is critical to understand before you start.”
For some industries, like software, there are very few limitations, and figuring out how you’re getting to market is not complicated. You can often put software out there and see how the market responds.
But in industries that are heavily regulated, such as pharmaceutical and medical devices, the path to market is often laborious, and as a result, innovation has to be prescribed. Time tables are much longer. They’re not late to the digitizing party. They’re just constrained by their industry’s limitations.
And as much as they’d like to implement development philosophies like lean startup, where you get to market as fast as possible and then iterate, it’s just not possible. Lean startup works best in the consumer market, and also B2B if there’s a direct connection with customers who can give rapid feedback.
Regulated industries simply don’t have that option for fast feedback.
“There has been a passion to be able to apply something like lean startup to these more regulated industries, but you have to look at why it works in software before you decide to apply it in something that is by its nature for our protection much more slow-moving,” said Miller.
With that said, Miller is excited about the traditionally slow-moving industries such as agriculture and construction. They are the last ones to digitize and we’re going to see some amazing innovations as they finally do.
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