Jan Bosch
In the previous post, we focused on the role of platforms to accomplish a constant evolution of the products we manufacture. As such, we accept that the traditional premise of manufacturing – producing as many copies of the same item as possible for as long as possible – is no longer a viable way forward. … Read more
Many companies are good at generating sustaining innovations in their mature, revenue generating products. We know what KPIs customers care about and we focus our efforts on continues improvement of these KPIs. For example, because of regulation as well as customer preference, the fuel efficiency of vehicles as well as their reliability has steadily improved … Read more
There is a wonderful “not safe for work” quote that states that assumption is the mother of all eff-ups. Many of the things that went wrong in my life can, when doing root cause analysis, be directly blamed on me having the wrong assumptions about the situation at hand or reality at large. Of course, … Read more
One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is the amount of misconception around the notion of innovation. Reams of paper have been filled with reflections on successful innovation and the people behind successful innovation typically receive enormous amounts of attention in their industry. Of course, what remains unsaid in these conversations is … Read more
One of the most common questions I get when discussing digitalization of an industry and a company operating in that industry concerns resources. The typical line of argument goes along the lines of agreeing that it is relevant and important to explore digital solutions for the company, but that unfortunately no resources are available to … Read more
Innovation is one of those overloaded terms that in popular discussion can mean anything that you want it to. In some ways, it’s similar to the parable of the four blind men and the elephant: depending on where you work on innovation, it will look and feel different. As a consequence, I still need to … Read more
For all the talk about digitalization over the last decade or more, I still run into many people outside of software R&D who are convinced that digitalization is a technical problem that doesn’t concern them. Often, it’s viewed as an opportunity for improving the efficiency of existing processes and ways of working. The result is … Read more
William Edwards Demming, the American who helped Japan rebuild itself after World War II, famously said: “In God we trust; all others must bring data.” This is still a lesson most companies haven’t fully incorporated. Once a platform gets a certain amount of traction, the opportunity to make data-driven decisions presents itself. This is incredibly … Read more
Any solution aiming to stay relevant needs to continuously integrate new, innovative functionality. The main reason is that functionality commoditizes over time so that if we wouldn’t add new features, the entire product or platform would commoditize and become irrelevant. Commodity software isn’t necessarily useless, as proven by quite a bit of open-source software, but … Read more
A key challenge for any software product is quality. Before we can do anything to experiment with customers and improve the product, we need to make sure that the product does what it’s supposed to. Although no software is free from defects, there being too many of them hurts the perception of the product and … Read more
