Nadeem Rizvi, Managing Director, Laser Micromachining Ltd
Many people have great ideas but very few make a success of those ideas in terms of making their inventions useful or getting a return on their inventiveness. For every Edison, Marconi or Stephenson, there are thousands of other inventors who we never hear of and who never make it.
Coming up with a new idea may appear to be the hard part but usually the bright spark of invention is just the start of the very long journey to (potential) success. An invention may be interesting in itself but has very limited real value unless it can be utilised effectively. In terms of making a real product from an idea, actually ending up with something that works is a very difficult challenge and many good concepts never see the light of day. Manufacturing things is a very hard business and a lot of businesses decide not to take on the difficulties of production themselves but choose the licensing route instead - sell the idea and let someone else have the headache of solving manufacturing problems, taking a cut from the product sales once it gets to market.
Those companies that do undertake manufacturing will know how complex it can be to get the concept from the drawing board to the consumer. There are a myriad of issues to address: converting the idea into a design for manufacture; sourcing the right materials; establishing the production processes; market analysis; prototyping parts; testing; quality controls; regulatory compliance; packaging; forming supply chains; marketing; logistics and many more (not least funding the whole enterprise). Each of these elements, by themselves, is a huge, non-trivial undertaking but making everything work together (and doing so cost-effectively) is what makes real-world manufacturing so difficult.
All these manufacturing steps are part of something which can generally be termed ‘commercialisation’, that is the conversion of an idea into a business. This is true in all industries. Although commercialisation can be broken down into a series of steps, it is far more difficult to define what constitutes innovation; in fact, it is often easier to recognise innovation than it is to prescribe how to innovate. MIT has an interesting take on all this and its definition is this: Innovation = Invention x Commercialisation. This neatly folds ideas and business into the concept of innovation and encompasses the essence of a lot of activity which we all undertake in micro-manufacturing businesses. In this regard, the over-used term ‘innovative’ maybe should be viewed with a bit more scepticism since just having something new does not, by itself, mean that it is truly innovative.
It is obvious that ‘traditional’ manufacturing is on the wane and many industries which were borne out of the industrial revolution will not last long, if they have survived this far anyway. There is a big re-adjustment underway in Western economies towards service industries and, together with the strong reliance on the finance and digital economy sectors, it is likely that fewer and fewer people will actually be involved with real manufacturing in the future. The paradox of this scenario is that at the same time we are increasing our consumption and turnover of material things, especially ‘smart’ and ‘digital’ products, so those items will still need to be made, and in increasing numbers.
The factories of the future will look markedly different to those of the last century but, unlike in the case of ‘heavy’ foundries like steel and coal mills, manufacturing plants for micro-products will allow far more scope for success to far more companies and entrepreneurs. New inventors or small start-ups with new ideas should be able to compete in the world of micro-technologies in the way it was not possible to do so in traditional industries because the access to commercialisation is markedly different in this new micro-era. Hence newcomers should not be put-off from innovating their micro-product ideas – there is as much chance that they will succeed as there is that larger (possibly less flexible or innovative) companies would do so. The manufacturing playing field is a lot more level in new micro-technologies than has been the case for traditional industries.
Innovation is a key driver for emerging micro-technologies and the manufacturing side of product development will remain something that should be valued properly. It is good to see that companies which have built themselves on being ‘non-manufacturing’ (the likes of Facebook and Amazon) are now divesting some of their huge profits into new manufacturing technologies for robots, aircraft, cars and the like. Making things is still going to be important, even in the new domains of micro-nano products, and we should encourage new ideas and foster those companies that wish to innovate. Having the right idea is only a small part of the solution; making it a reality is far more challenging.