Innovation

Even more interesting than flying on Southwest is innovation.

Yesterday, I read about some guys who invented a better way to draw draft beer out of a keg. 

Better in this context means faster, more even pulls (regardless of skill level), a perfect head every time, and less waste (from all the foam that is usually left over at the end). 

An innovation that could have happened years ago but didn’t until just now.  Less waiting in lines at the ballpark, and maybe even a lower cost per glass of beer.  Not just interesting, but good too.

And the day before yesterday, I read about some guy who invented a surf machine. 

This thing simulates an ocean wave, giving the perfect curl every time.  $700,000 each.  And they’re selling like hotcakes to amusement centers the world over. 

Interesting innovation, although it might not be so good for the serious beer drinker.

And last week, we had a cross-sectional group of customers from one the world’s largest oil companies tell us how excited they were about PAS and its products.  Innovation, they said, is what drove their excitement. 

This group was so excited that they were interrupting each other to uncover the best way to get this PAS software into their plants.  [ And, remember we’re talking about the rather traditional oil refining business here – excitement like this just doesn’t happen every day!  ]

Sometimes we are so close to our own products, or so caught up in how we think people should be using our products, that we fail to see the innovation appeal to outsiders.  The customers last week reminded us that PAS is full of innovations – from its first product to its newest.

At PAS, we want innovation to be a way of life – even if it costs more or is more difficult to achieve.  From building graphics to deploying dynamic model-based optimizers, we don’t want to improve upon other’s innovations – we allow the “me-too” companies do that – rather, we want to lead.  We want to intentionally be in the business of creating new technologies to solve our customers’ problems of tomorrow. 

To paraphrase the Great One in our context, “While everybody else is rushing to where the puck is, we at PAS position ourselves strategically to where the puck will be.”

Hard work, for sure, but nobody promised us that our desire to be leader would be easy.  We just need to make sure that our hard work doesn’t become someone else’s gold mine… we have enough wanna-be innovators copying us already…

Mostly, these copycats are easy to spot, but sometimes, they almost look like the real thing.  Argh!