Category: RFID

Listen to the Market

When the Market Speaks, What Wins?

When it comes to offering something new, always listen to the market. If you don’t, your company certainly won’t win.  All too often, innovations tend to be ahead of the market, and sometimes it will take a significant amount of time before the market will accept them.

Companies that don’t heed the market’s voice will find themselves investing resources into innovation that may not be accepted. Years ago, I was a part of this kind of scenario, where we created an RFID-based business, Sustainable Management Systems (SMS), that could create a great amount of value to our customers – or so we thought.  We failed to understand the specifics behind our go-to-market strategy. We erroneously thought the utilities were ready to adopt RFID into their business – they weren’t.

In this case the innovation was cutting-edge and had the potential to be extremely valuable.  However, the market wasn’t prepared to incorporate that kind of technology. We learned from this experience, and while the SMS technology is now a relevant offering, we made sure that our next innovation would be a recognized market need. To accurately identify what the market wanted, we needed to implement a dedicated innovative process.

In the early stages of the formal innovation process, which I’ve described in previous posts,  we made sure to conduct market research among customers and prospective customers, to see what their pain points were and how we might be able to help address them. Through this process, it soon became clear that there was a huge opportunity present in trying to find ways to help these customers create more sustainable business models for themselves. We kept hearing from our biggest customers—investor-owned, publicly traded utilities—about the greatly increasing scrutiny they were facing with regard to their environmental sustainability practices, so we knew that making these practices more sustainable from an economic standpoint as well would be very attractive to our customers.

By integrating the market’s voice into our innovation process, we not only gained valuable ideas and insights, we would create an innovative initiative that would be welcomed and embraced by the very market we serve. When the market speaks, listen; more importantly, take the time to actually ask the market. Doing so will ensure successful implementation of your innovation from the beginning.

Learn more about our successful approach to innovation by getting your own copy of Transforming the Utility Pole which you can find here.

global warming

The Impact of the “Anthropocene Period” and What We Can Do About It

There’s a debate amongst geologists and environmentalists about the impact of humans and how to label this period of impact in Earth’s history. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the term being discussed amongst scientists is, “… ‘Anthropocene’ – from anthropo, for ‘man’ and cene, for ‘new’ – because human-kind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altered the atmosphere, among other lasting impacts.”


There’s no question that our impact on the environment has been significant and that those changes have and will continue to affect the planet. As an industry, we see this in the kind of energy that is produced and in the disposal of resources used in the process.


Where does all that waste go? What is done with resources that no longer fulfill the useful life determined by the utility? Traditionally it’s been hauled off to the dump along with every other human-beings’ garbage. The problem is, this approach went largely unregulated for the longest time, leading to a number of issues including pests, toxicity and the presence of poisonous materials that leach into the ground and affect the water supply and the broader environment.


The landfill developed in the early twentieth century as a cleaner, safer alternative and would eventually grow to replace the city dump. The idea behind the landfill is essentially to isolate the garbage (known as “municipal solid waste”) in a confined space, control leaching and gas emissions, and cover the surface with soil on a daily basis. In the United States, landfills are subject to stringent EPA regulations.


Even with these regulations, there will be a time where there is no more room. The social and environmental costs of current practices, especially among utilities that are disposing of their used poles, are too high to maintain. With landfills reaching capacity, we in the industry have no choice but to seek alternative disposal methods; otherwise, we are on a collision course with disaster.


Despite the irreversible imprint that has been made on Earth by human presence, we have the ability to be more aware, responsible, and sustainable in our day-to-day/business practices. It is possible to improve and be more responsible; however, effort and resources must be dedicated to this cause.  Learn more about how you can effectively integrate innovation within your organization to become more sustainable, all while continuing to be profitable. Visit, barrybreede.com.

Innovation

Don’t Reinvent the Utility Pole: Sustainable Management System

We’ve all heard before—don’t reinvent the wheel. The phrase speaks to the waste of time and resources it would take to reinvent something that’s already been discovered. Instead, those resources could be used to transform the use of the wheel to create new ideas, processes, products and/or services.

The same could be said for the utility pole industry in which Cox Industries operates. Cox is a family-owned business, founded in the 1950s by brothers W.B. and E.J. Cox, that manufactures and distributes treated wood products ranging from lumber for residential buildings to poles for purchase and use by utilities. W.B. Cox—Bill Sr., grandfather of current Cox CEO Mikee Johnson—was driven from the beginning to keep coming up with new ways of making his company more efficient and profitable.

Cox wouldn’t find innovation in trying to create a different/new utility pole, instead it found innovation in the processes surrounding that utility pole.

Finding Innovation Elsewhere

At first blush you’d probably assume there wouldn’t be a whole lot of innovation happening in the utility pole industry—Cox changed that. In the commodity market we operate in, looking at things from the perspective of the customer—utilities in particular—made it clear that product-based innovations (i.e., making a new and better utility pole) were not going to add value for us; in cases like that, innovators have to turn to ancillary services based on their product, expanding their business model to include a service component.

In our case, this meant creating new businesses under the Cox umbrella. Our first development actually grew out of our exploration of the value of using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology—a method for tracking items, similar to bar codes—to tag and track the poles we manufactured.

No one else in our industry was using RFID at the time. We started by implementing RFID in our own plants for internal inventory purposes, but we soon realized that this same technology would also allow utilities to better track, inspect, and maintain the poles once they were put up in their service areas. This led us to form a software company, Sustainable Management Systems (SMS), that essentially sells the capability for utilities to more quickly and accurately maintain their inventory of poles in use. Rather than reinventing the utility pole, SMS just attaches a service that provides added value for our utility customers by allowing them to move away from traditional paper-and-pencil inspection of poles.

It wasn’t the utility pole—our main product—that required the innovation; instead it was the experience and processes that surrounded our product where we found ways to innovate that transformed the industry. The same approach could be the key to innovation for your company; look beyond the obvious and see what can be improved.

Learn how to successfully integrate innovation into your company and industry by contacting me!