Ideas make a company great

Good companies, superb products and customer satisfaction all start with great ideas.

New ideas for innovation are perhaps one of the most obvious distinctions that set humans apart from all other life on this planet.  New ideas have been the single largest force bringing change into our lives. 

Take the example of the computer and Moore’s Law which predicts a doubling of processing power every 18 months.  For 40 years now (since 1965!), new ideas have brought about what seemed impossible over and over and over again.

As a solutions provider to the process industries, PAS has introduced its share of ideas to the market.  First-mover ideas like automated control system documentation (1996), alarm management (1994), and no-step-testing multivariable control (1988) have each brought significant advantage to customers and the company alike.

So how does a company become sustainably great?  I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some ideas…

FIRST, bring on the super-gee’s. 

PAS has its share of super-smart and innovative people helping to drive change and continuous improvement – whether this is in the form of new software products or new ways to work with existing systems.  From the graphics builder to the software architect, our team is well-equipped.

So far, so good…

SECOND, invest in new ideas. 

Investing to bring intellectual property to market in a way that makes a difference to the customer’s operations is key.  At PAS, we put over 20% of revenue back into product development.  Not every investment becomes a superstar, but each contributes: if not as future revenue then as learnings on which to build future revenue.

Still so far so good…

THIRD, accept failure. 

Failure is a necessary ingredient to innovation. Without it, most of the great ideas that we are familiar with today, just wouldn’t have come to be.  Consider the light bulb.  Thousands of failures, eventually leading to a superb product that changed the world.

This is the hard one.

Tolerating failure is hard.  Our western business culture does not look too kindly on failure.  The biggest challenge to becoming a great company is then to build a culture that accepts and learns from failure.

Because without this, even the most superb of super-gee’s will hold back on his/her ideas and the company will be relegated to the imitation of the success of others.

And that doesn’t sound too fun at all.