Beware of new ideas. They can be 25 years ahead of their time

IDEAS are ten a penny. Put a handful of bright engineers in a brainstorming session and they will come up with literally scores of clever ideas for new products or processes. Invention is the easy bit. Innovation, by contrast, is the genuinely difficult part. And what makes a successful innovation usually has little to do with the originality of the idea behind it. What it does depend on -and crucially so- is the single-mindedness with which the business plan is executed, as countless obstacles on the road to commercialisation are surmounted, by-passed or hammered flat. Life in the fast lane really is 1% inspiration and 99% pure sweat.

Implicit in all this is timing. The window of opportunity has to be ajar - or, at least, show signs of opening. It matters little whether some exciting new technology has suddenly become available. If the market timing is wrong, the innovation will most assuredly flounder."

[Invention is the easy bit, Jun 21st 2001, From The Economist print edition]

Innovative Design Delft

Innovative Design Delft designs and develops electronic- and information systems since 1980. We are strictly focused on new things, complex problems and pushing the edge. Innovative Design Delft designs and produces electronics from the simplest analog products up to the most complex high speed optical communications systems with large gate arrays. We have 40+ year experience with development and maintenance of all thinkable kinds of software.

"Product focus. Every other business model is a scam of some kind."

History

1980 First analog products developed, first 1000 piece production run. Nitelite a portable VU-meter, worn by the presenter of the Eurovision Song Contest 1984 in Luxembourg.
1982-1994 First digital computer system developed with a digital interface to a professional video recorder system.
1985-1995 Pronto! Programmable Read Only Memory programmer. (Still in use and supported!)
1985-1986 Sophie, a multi user Unix computer, with MMU, DMA, DRAM refresh and one of the first SCSI interfaces.
1989-2001 MIW-02 Eurocard with CPU, DSP, AD/DA converter and floppy controller for direct recording of speech on a floppy.
1990-2001 MIW-01 Eurocard with CPU, DSP, AD/DA and SCSI controller for direct recording of speech on harddisk or digital tape.
1992-2003 M-64 Phone line recorder, based on the MIW-01, records audio and all known signalling systems with call data to both 200MB, 17 hr SCSI hard-disk and 2.5GB, 170 hr SCSI tape-drive.
1994-now Z++ / Unicom, communication system for elderly people distributed by Tyco ADT Wormald Zettler, hardware still fully serviced!
1994-2011 SI-Series multiple channel audio recorders based on Windows-NT, fully integrated in the Windows environment.
1995-now KY-xx series, stand alone access controllers with Dallas Key reading, audible alarm, large key memory and RS-232. Accompanied by Key4Win Windows/NT logging and control software.
1998-2011 PP-00, 2x 2Mbit ISDN to PCI interface with special provisions for tapping both directions of a 2 Mbit ISDN interface.
2000-2010 WM-00, a simple but versatile system for registering and forwarding alarm calls within a facility.
2001-now E-knip, high-speed web search engine software that scans new text only for the occurrence of 10.000+ words submitted by subscribers.
2001-now FT-X, a highly secure, easy to install and maintain system for Internet tapping by Internet Providers. With the FT-X dual hardware loopback 155-2480 Mbps Multirate and Multi Protocol Fiber Tap PCI-card. This PCI-card taps dual full rate OC-3 / OC-12 / OC-48 ATM and POS and Gigabit Ethernet data streams. print layout
2002-now
iidesk, easy to use web-based database management tools. Agenda's with up to thousands of users, centralised e-mail, OpenStreetMap based interactive geolocation services etc etc etc.
2003-now FT-Y system, dedicated firewall for law enforcement, a secure modular distribution and recording system for data intercepted by Internet and Telecom Providers.
2004-now RSSknip, software for high speed near real time analysis of 500,000+ RSS feeds, front end for the E-knip engine.
2005-now
 iidesk dbv5, ultimate unification of all earlier iidesk row/column/record database viewers.
2006-2009
 Key technical and legal advice regarding a 500,000 euro domain name sale.
2021
 DR-00, a simple but effective two-channel line monitoring tool.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Beware of new ideas. They can be 25 years ahead of their time

IDEAS are ten a penny. Put a handful of bright engineers in a brainstorming session and they will come up with literally scores of clever ideas for new products or processes. Invention is the easy bit. Innovation, by contrast, is the genuinely difficult part. And what makes a successful innovation usually has little to do with the originality of the idea behind it. What it does depend on -and crucially so- is the single-mindedness with which the business plan is executed, as countless obstacles on the road to commercialisation are surmounted, by-passed or hammered flat. Life in the fast lane really is 1% inspiration and 99% pure sweat.

Implicit in all this is timing. The window of opportunity has to be ajar - or, at least, show signs of opening. It matters little whether some exciting new technology has suddenly become available. If the market timing is wrong, the innovation will most assuredly flounder."

[Invention is the easy bit, Jun 21st 2001, From The Economist print edition]


Contact 

Materials:

Koornmarkt 34
2611 EH DELFT
Netherlands
Phone: +31 15 214 02 44
E-Mail: contact@idd.nl
site by idd.nl
idd.nl B.V.: copyright notice, terms and conditions, idd homepage, contact@idd.nl