Blog Post

It takes more than a great invention to get product to market.

#innovation Jan 30, 2021
john-cameron-unsplash.jpg

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog for Defy Expectations about the unsung heroes of logistics. We are now through the well-deserved euphoria about how amazing the vaccine developers have been, and we are slowly realising that just inventing something is only a small part of the story.  We love and celebrate innovators.  We bemoan the fact that so many great British innovations get exploited by others.  We are missing the point.

Constant innovation is incredibly important for any company or country.  Without it, civilisations shrivel and die.  But the reality about innovation is that it is so often doomed to fail. 

Back in the 1990’s I was the BT representative on an e-cash project called Mondex.  It did what the contactless card does today (in fact it was bought by MasterCard).  It was great innovation, all the team members were very excited, the problem was that when we ran a public test of the product no one was very interested.  Why replace cash?  Today we all know why, it really was not clear to anyone then.

Mondex failed because it was the right product at the wrong time. It is a major reason for the failure of great ideas.  There are many others – lack of money; wrong people; greed; apathy….  There’s a long list.

Vaccines are the right product at the right time, but we are realising that you cannot deliver them on anything like the right volume.  What we are coming to understand in the full glare of global publicity is that making things with quality, with consistency, and on a global scale, is really, really very hard.

Taking a vaccine you have created in a lab – even if you have produced enough for comprehensive vaccine trials – and then moving that to a factory environment is difficult.  Even harder when you have been compelled by customer pressure to sign up to delivery schedules that are probably unachievable.   

If you make any other product at scale you will go through a series of steps to scale up production.  Often you will launch, only to have to recall because of hardware or software glitches. You cannot recall a vaccine.  Then there are the next steps in the process, and they have to scale too.  Like the manufacturers, the agencies that test, the logistics companies, the delivery organisations, will all have to scale up.  You have a great product but no lorries or pallets – it’s not going anywhere.

At every step there will be failures, generally recoverable with time and investment but all adding time and money into the process.   For the vaccine manufacturers there is only one step in the public view – take what you have done and deliver world-wide.

The pressure on them has been compounded by understandably desperate hope and by politicians who do not want to understand reality but want to score points.

Eventually, when all the problems in the end-to-end process have been ironed-out the vaccines will flow but the lessons of innovation are proving hard to learn.

 Pat Chapman-Pincher  January 2021

Pat's passions are helping leaders at all levels to reach their full potential and to help companies succeed in a world where technology is transforming the way we do business.  Pat is a qualified coach, she works with Boards to improve their performance and gets a great deal of enjoyment from her NED roles in innovative growth companies.

Pat is a Founder of www.defyexpectations.co.uk