Getting to market first is a good thing, according to Rob Irwin, but it’s just part if a much more complex equation
Time to market has been a well-worn mantra of the electronics industry. Unfortunately it’s been elevated to the level of panacea – and it’s not. Don’t get me wrong. Getting to market early is a good thing.
It’s just not the stepping stone to success that it used to be. Today it’s just part of a much more complex equation. Electronics companies and designers need to solve the whole equation in order to survive and remain competitive as a new generation of electronics products begs for creation.
When I was a young electronics designer (think pre-IBM XT) things were simpler. Electronics was all about the hardware: functionality was embodied in the secret way basic components were connected together to do magical things. To the general public, new electronic devices were a source of wonderment, and breaking new ground gave electronics companies a clear lead in the marketplace. It generally took time for competitors to respond to any technology move, and typically this was geographically dependent.
A lot has changed in 30 years, and not just on the technology front. From an industry point of view the world has become considerably smaller. The development of the online ‘grapevine’ has meant that designers anywhere in the world now have access to devices and technologies essentially as they are developed and released.
One of the consequences of this is that whatever you or I do with any particular off-the-shelf discrete components to create some functionality in our new product can – and does – get recreated almost instantly somewhere else in the world. The globalised marketplace means that we are essentially competing against our own designs thrown back at us from offshore within literally weeks of launching our latest and greatest product offering.
Another change is the growing sophistication of consumers of electronics – not only in the general consumer sector, but all electronics markets from medical and industrial to communications. People are simply no longer impressed by the technology alone. Devices have reached a level of sophistication where, from a technical standpoint, they generally do more than enough to satisfy the basic requirements at the electronics level. In short, it’s getting harder to impress customers with the underlying circuitry, no matter how good or ‘new’ it is.
Which way design?
So what does this mean for electronics product development and those who practise it? Getting to market early and quickly with a device is important. It plays well in a marketing sense and is a powerful tool for market penetration, so it can't be ignored. But today you can no longer build and protect a market position on the back of it. It is simply the price of entry and is ultimately meaningless without other considerations.
Prime among these is that next generation electronics products won't be stand-alone devices. They will be smart devices connected to wider product ecosystems that provide a user experience that goes way beyond the manufactured hardware. Consideration of this ‘user experience’ needs to take centre stage in the design process. Many of the capabilities and services that ultimately make up this experience may well lie outside the device, residing on remote servers and accessed via the internet. This extended product ‘ecosystem’ will, by necessity, evolve over time, so the devices that connect to it need to be designed in such a way as to facilitate upgrades and the addition of new functionality as it becomes available. From a device focus, this means implementing as much functionality as possible in the soft domain, using traditional software and – increasingly – programmable hardware.
This movement of functionality into the soft domain is desirable from another standpoint as well. It makes it harder for competitors to simply copy the basic functionality of a device, requiring a significantly more intense reverse engineering effort.
Innovation getting sacrificed
Moving our focus from a device perspective to one that puts the device into the context of a wider distributed system makes the overall design task a lot more complicated. And this is the rub. Our traditional design methods are rooted in a linear ‘hardware first, software second’ approach. As we add complexity at the back end, we run the risk of extending design times. And this runs contrary to the rules of the time-to-market game. What ends up getting sacrificed to shorten that time to market is the most crucial element of all – innovation.
Designers have little or no time to ‘play’ with the soft functionality that defines the critical user experience. They are also constrained by the hardware choices made early in the design cycle - choices made when the overall product experience was a distant dot on the development horizon.
As we move into a new generation of electronics, it’s time to take a step back and look at the way we go about the development process. It’s time to challenge the conventions that we have come to take for granted, or worse still, elevated to an immutable law of development that we blindly follow.
Pursuing time-to-market at all costs is no longer a worthwhile chase. Sacrificing innovation in the process is now downright dangerous. We still need to get to market early. We still need to be able to compete on price. And we still need to turn out a device that looks and feels like something we'd want to own. But that's really just the entry ticket. Today we need to go further and change our development processes with consideration to the relationship we want to build with our customers through the electronic devices we sell. This will require thinking at a whole new level of abstraction. A level that spans design disciplines, brings together hardware and software and lets us concentrate on functionality first, free from the need to work within fixed hardware constraints.
We need to accept that global shifts have and are happening – we simply can’t fight that – and focus now on how we need to adapt to cope with these shifts. The game now is not to simply get a new product or idea out early to market. It is to get a product into the market that can be the vehicle to continued and sustainable innovation over the long term. The value we add to products beyond the devices themselves, and after we go to market, will be the true measure of success as we move into the next generation of electronics design.
Rob Irwin is Altium manager of brand strategy
Source: http://www.cieonline.co.uk/cie3/ViewArticle.asp?ArtID=21670