Articles
Timing is everything when launching a new technology to an unsuspecting market. I’ve spent most of my 30-year career developing measurement tools – and have learnt one very important lesson: being on the right side of the demand curve is crucial.
Today’s world is characterised by the almost imperceptible yet rapid rise of technology. Think about CCTV equipment. Back in the 1970s, these systems were rare and recording was difficult due to poor picture resolution. Wind forward 40 years and you can hardly go anywhere in a city without your movements being tracked by CCTV. Events can be recorded with trivial ease using devices in your pocket which can store quantities of information that would have filled a room in the 1960s.
The same rate of development can be seen in the 3D measurement market – in particular within pipes and other difficult-to-reach structures associated with the offshore oil and gas market. Forty years ago, measuring the dimensions of a pipe out in the field would have been impossible. Now a full 3D survey of a pipe is routinely possible where the dimensional data can be overlaid with superb-quality imagery to provide a full assessment of any problem, from corrosion to defective welding.
But when it comes to the commercialisation of emerging technologies, your position as an innovator on the Diffusion of Innovation Curve is crucial. If you’re too far ahead of the curve, it’s likely that the market won’t know that it needs your solution. Either that or, in the case of surveillance equipment, the infrastructure (storage data, quality of cameras) is not there yet.
A perfect example of this is the measurement of pipes without the use of feelers or micrometers – without even coming into contact with the structure being measured. In this instance, we were so far ahead of the curve when we first developed our 3D pipe-measuring device in the 1980s that we had serious problems.
Firstly, the laptop processing power did not exist then – so we could not present the richness of structural detail we had collected. Even producing a wire-frame view of a scanned structure took the best computer I could afford hours just to provide one viewpoint!
Secondly, we had to lug around high-voltage CRT monitors, which were heavy and dangerous, just to visualise the measurement data. Thirdly, and most importantly, no one else had any use for the information as they too had slow computers and were still used to paper drawings. In short, by 1987 I had developed game-changing technology that would take 20 years to commercialise.
Since then, I have developed a far more sophisticated sense of the commercial imperative and learnt not to get carried away on the euphoria of creating a technology that no one actually wants or needs.
It’s not enough to develop technology for its own sake. My company’s future is rooted in the ability to develop answers to real problems, where accurate measurement or detailed inspection is critical to engineers operating in the oil and gas, nuclear, refining and energy sectors.