The concept of innovation

Unit summary

This unit should have given you some idea of the issues surrounding the concept of innovation, in particular the key concepts of invention and innovation, and the negative as well as the positive effects that innovations can bring. Although the business functions have been recognised in passing, you should be able to see how the functioning of an organisation can be affected by innovation. Remember that although innovation can take place within any one function of the organisation, this can have an impact across the whole organisation.

We hope that you have found this an interesting and challenging unit and that you now have a better understanding of the importance of innovation to organisations.

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References

Porter, M. E. (1990) The Competitive Advantage of Nations, New York, The Free Press.

Postman, N. (1998) ‘New technology keeps whizzing into our lives’, The Guardian, 5 December (The Editor, pp. 12–13).

Acknowledgements

The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence.

Photographs/Cartoons

Figure 1: (top right and left, bottom right): Mike Levers, The Open University;

Figure 1: (bottom left): Courtesy of Ford Motor Company;

Figure 2: Copyright © Ted Goff, www.tedgoff.com.

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The concept of innovation

What’s so great about innovation?

So far we have suggested that innovation is a positive concept and, it appears, the rate of innovation continues to accelerate, led mostly by technology. The process is an example of positive feedback, in which the change is self-reinforcing: the development of technology itself increases the capacity for technological innovation, and raises the expectation of consumers for further innovation. While there seems little reason why this process of accelerating technological change should not continue for the foreseeable future, a counter-view argues that change for change’s sake is not necessarily always desirable. In the following paragraphs we introduce six questions that Neil Postman of New York University believes should be asked when considering innovations (Postman, 1998):

  • What is the problem to which this technology is a solution? For example, what problems do a ‘smart’ door knob, or 500 broadcasting channels, really solve?
  • Whose problem is it? Most technologies solve some problems, but the problem may not be most people’s problem. The people who benefit from a technology may not be the ones who pay for it.
  • What new problems might we be creating? There are few technologies that do not create new problems – often unanticipated ones.
  • Who may be harmed by the technology? New technologies always produce losers as well as winners.
  • What changes is the technology bringing to language? The electronic community, for example, is very different from the traditional meaning of the word ‘community’.
  • How does the technology realign economic and political power? By understanding the changes, we can then decide if we want them.

Postman concludes by saying:

Entrepreneurs like Morse, Edison and Disney created the 20th century, as Gates and others are now creating the 21st. I don’t know if much can be done to moderate the cultural changes they will enforce, but citizens ought to know what’s happening and keep an attentive eye on such people.

(Postman, 1998)

Examples of the second-order (indirect or unintended) effects of technological innovation are given in Box 1.

Box 1: Second-order technological innovation

  • The US government decided not to match the British and French in the development of supersonic passenger transport. The three-hour saving in travel time to cross the Atlantic would probably be used to watch television – so why not put televisions on subsonic jets?
  • Should governments (i.e. taxpayers) pay for the development of supersonic transport that would benefit mainly movie stars, rock musicians and corporate executives?
  • Cars have solved transport problems but have led to pollution; antibiotics have reduced disease but have weakened the immune system; and television has extended communication and entertainment but has changed the nature of political discourse.
  • The Luddites recognised the advantages of mechanisation, but also saw that it would damage their own lives. The use of ‘Luddite’ (someone who resists technological change) as an insult ignores the reality that technology produces losers as well as winners.
  • Email has transformed the nature of communication – many children today have never written a letter.
  • Technological innovation empowers some and disenfranchises others. So television favours those who master the soundbite over those who engage in detailed debate. The digital age has created a new class of the electronically illiterate, who may become as disadvantaged as other illiterates.
(Adapted from Postman, 1998)

Activity 6

You should allow 0 hour(s), 30 minute(s).

Think of an innovation relevant to you through your work or in your role as a consumer. Answer the following questions in relation to that innovation:

  1. What benefits has it brought to consumers, and how do these compare with the benefits brought to the organisation that introduced the innovation?
  2. Can you identify any second-order effects that have arisen from this innovation?

We have chosen as an example the introduction of desktop publishing (DTP) technology, and have answered the questions as follows:

  1. We suspect that the benefits to consumers have been considerable, by making high-quality publishing largely independent of scale and greatly expanding its accessibility. There have also been benefits to the software manufacturers, but these have been shortlived, as newer technologies replaced the older ones and competition has restricted the price and margin potential for the manufacturers.
  2. There are several second-order effects, many of them derived from the de-skilling that the new technology brings about. The positive aspects of this – greater access, lower costs, speed – are offset in part by the negative effects on the traditional craft industries of printing and design. The winners are the customers of traditional printers, and those organisations that have rapidly developed the skills in the new technology. The losers are the craft printers and those who have been unable or unwilling to develop the skills to operate the new technology.

INNOVATION :The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company

Joshua Mecael and Jairus James

APRIL 03, 2016

 

Can you think of any business topic that’s been hotter for longer than innovation? Trouble is, it’s hard to think of any business challenge where real pro­gress has been harder to come by. By now, your company probably has a new busi­ness incubator, an idea wiki, a disciplined process for mining customer insights, an awards program for successful innovators, and maybe even an outpost in Silicon Valley—all fine ideas—and yet, most likely, it still struggles to meet its growth goals and seldom thrills its customers. And it’s not just your company. In a McKinsey poll, 94% of the managers surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their company’s innovation performance.

By comparison, think of the long strides many businesses have made in reengineering their supply chains, boosting product quality, and rolling out lean six sigma. These efforts have paid huge dividends. And yet when it comes to innovation, the gap between aspiration and accomplishment seems as big as ever. What’s the problem?

Over the past two decades, we’ve led dozens of innovation projects and have talked to thousands of managers about the challenge of building a high-performance innovation “engine.” What we’ve observed is that in most organizations, the innovation power­train is missing several critical components.

Imagine a car motor that lacks a transmission, timing belt, water pump, or starter. The engine may be otherwise well built, but without just one of these components, it will be essentially worthless. So it is with innovation. However much brainstorming your employees do, it will come to naught if they don’t have access to the seed money they need to prototype and test their ideas. Likewise, no matter how slick your company’s online idea market, it won’t yield many high-value ideas if your associates haven’t been taught to think like innovators.

No single innovation tool or method will deliver consistent, profitable breakthroughs, and neither will a hodgepodge of misaligned or poorly integrated practices. It takes a systematic approach to build a systemic capability—whether that is Amazon’s logistics prowess or the near-flawless service you receive as a guest at a Four Seasons hotel. So it is with innovation. Skills, tools, met­rics, processes, platforms, incentives, roles, and values all have to come together in one supercharged, all-wheel-drive, race-winning innovation machine.

So what are the parts of the innovation engine that most often get left out? Here’s our list of the top five:

1. Employees who’ve been taught to think like innovators

We’re a bit dumbfounded that so few companies have invested systemati­cally in improving the innovation skills of their employees. The least charitable explana­tion for this oversight is that despite evidence to the contrary, many senior managers still assume that a few genetically blessed souls are innately crea­tive, while the rest can’t come up with anything more exciting than suggestions for the cafeteria menu.

We understand how a CEO might come to such a conclusion. Every day, senior executives get bombarded with ideas—and most of them are either woefully underdeveloped or downright batty. After a while, it’s easy to believe that all those dopey ideas must be coming from dopes, rather than from individuals who haven’t been trained in or given opportunities to practice innovative thinking, and who work within a system that hasn’t been properly designed to foster it.

Much has been written about where innovation comes from and what distinguishes an innovative mind. Our research and experience suggest that inquiry is at the heart of it. Innovators have an inclination and a capacity to examine what others often leave unexamined. So if you want innovation, individuals must to be taught to do four things:

  1. Challenge invisible orthodoxies. Within any industry, mental models tend to converge over time. Executives read the same trade magazines, go to the same conferences, and talk to the same consultants. After a while, they all think alike. Innovators, by contrast, are contrarians. In their quest to upend industry rules, they learn how to distinguish “immutable laws” from “ingrained beliefs.” They exploit the unhealthy reverence incumbents have for precedent.
  1. Harness underappreciated trends. Innova­tors don’t spend much time speculating about what might Instead, they pay a lot of attention to the little things that are already changing, and that are gathering speed. To be an innovator, you don’t need a crystal ball: you need a wide-angle lens. You have to be tracking trends your competitors haven’t yet noticed, then figuring out ways of using them to upend traditional business models.
  1. Leverage embedded competencies and assets. Innovation gets stymied when a company defines itself by what it does rather than by what it knows or owns—when its “concept of self” is built around products and services rather than around core competencies and strate­gic assets. Innovators see their organization, and the world around it, as a portfolio of skills and assets that can be endlessly recombined into new products and busi­nesses. They are masters of recombination.
  1. Address “unarticulated” needs. Customers have their own orthodoxies, so asking them what they want seldom yields a fundamentally new insight. Instead, you have to observe them, up close and over time, and then reflect on what you’ve learned. Where are we creating needless frustrations? Where are we wasting our customers’ time? Where are we making things overly complex? Where are we treating customers like numbers instead of people? To be an innovator, you have to be a relentlessly curious anthropologist and a keen-eyed ethnographer.

With a bit of training, and some opportunities for real-world practice, just about anyone can sig­nificantly upgrade their innovation skills. Whirlpool Corporation’s strong innovation perfor­mance in recent years owes much to the fact that the company trained more than 15,000 of its employees to be business innovators. Any innovation program that doesn’t start by helping individuals to see the world with “fresh eyes” will almost inevita­bly fall short of expectations.

2. A sharp, shared definition of innovation

To manage innovation in a systematic way, you have to have a widely understood definition of innovation. Without this, it’s impossible to know how much “real” innovation is going on and whether it’s paying off. Just as critically, you can’t hold leaders responsible for innovation if no one can agree on what’s innovative and what’s not.

Coming up with a practical definition of innovation is harder than it sounds, particularly if the goal is to rank every new initiative or product by its “innovative­ness.” When Heinz puts ketchup in a new squeeze bottle, is that innova­tion? When Comcast rolls out a new “triple play” pricing scheme, is that a break­through? When Whirlpool launches a washing machine that dispenses just the right amount of detergent, is that a game changer? While most people can distinguish between a genuine breakthrough (like the original iPhone) and a near-trivial product enhancement (like a new shade of Post-It® notes), it’s tougher to get agreement about all the shades of gray in between.

In our experience, it can take several months for a company to hammer out its defini­tion of innovation. As a starting point, it is important to look back over a decade or two and identify the sorts of ideas that have produced noticeable margin and revenue gains.

For a product or service to be counted as innovative at Whirlpool, it must be unique and compelling to the consumer, create a competitive advantage, sit on a migration path that can yield further innovations, and provide consumers with more value than anything else in the market. This definition may seem somewhat generic. What makes it useful, though, is the understanding that has developed over time as these criteria have been used to determine which ideas are truly innovative and which aren’t. With use, the defini­tion has gotten tighter, and differences of opinion have narrowed. It’s also important to periodically review the definition: did the prod­ucts that got rated as highly “innovative” actually yield above-average returns?

Having a practical, agreed-upon definition of innovation makes it easier to set goals for innovation, to allocate resources to innovative projects, to plan a cadence of innovative product launches, to target advertising on high-value breakthroughs, and to measure innovation performance.

3. Comprehensive innovation metrics

Companies measure just about everything that has an impact on the bottom line, yet strangely, they often shy away from measuring innovation. Granted, it is difficult to measure. Historical benchmarks are of limited value when a product has no antecedents, and it’s hard to pin down the future value of an idea that exists only as a concept.

Nevertheless, there are ways of measuring innovation performance. A comprehensive dashboard should track:

  • Inputs: the investment dollars and employee time devoted to innovation, along with the number of ideas that are gener­ated internally each month or sourced from customers, suppliers, and other out­siders.
  • Throughputs: the number and quality of ideas that enter the pipeline after initial screening, the time it takes for those ideas to move from concept to proto­type to reality, and the notional value of the innovation pipe­line.
  • Outputs: the number of innovations that reach the market in a given period, the percentage of revenue derived from new products and services, and the margin gains that are attributable to innovation.
  • Leadership: the percentage of executive time that gets devoted to mentor­ing innovation projects, and 360-degree survey results that reveal the extent to which execu­tives are exhibiting pro-innovation behaviors.
  • Competence: the percentage of employees who have been trained as business innovators, the percentage of employees who have qualified as innova­tion “black belts,” and changes in the quality of ideas that are being generated across the firm.
  • Climate: the extent to which the firm’s management processes facilitate or frustrate innovation, and the progress that is being made in remov­ing innova­tion blockages.
  • Efficiency: changes over time in the ratio of innovation outputs to inputs.
  • Balance: the mix of different types of innova­tion (product, service, pricing, distribution, operations, etc.); differ­ent risk cate­go­ries (incremental improvements versus speculative ventures); and differ­ent time horizons.

Once you’ve established the metrics and a baseline, you’re in a position to set specific, unit-by-unit innovation goals, and to fine-tune the innovation engine. Recently, for example, Whirl­pool’s Chairman and CEO, Jeff Fettig, set a goal for the company to double the value of its innovation pipeline over the next two years. Executives realized that to do this, they would need to reallocate some of the company’s innovation resources from late-stage product enhancements to early-stage product breakthroughs. With­out a set of comprehensive metrics, Whirlpool wouldn’t have been able to set such specific innovation goals, to proactively rebalance its innovation spending, or to measure the results of those actions.

4. Accountable and capable innovation leaders

What percentage of the leaders in your company, from project managers to execu­tive vice presidents, are formally accountable for innovation? What percentage have innovation-related targets that affect their compensation? If it’s anything less than 100%, innovation will be marginalized. Too often innovation is seen as the province of specialized units like R&D or corporate business development, rather than being the responsibility of every leader at every level.

Obviously, it makes little sense to hold leaders accountable for innovation if they haven’t been trained and coached to encourage innovation within their own teams. For a leader, this means:

  • Being adept at using innovation tools.
  • Creating frequent opportunities for blue-sky thinking.
  • Avoiding premature judgments when evaluating new options.
  • Demonstrating an appetite for unconventional ideas.
  • Recognizing innovators and celebrating “smart failures.”
  • Personally mentoring innovation teams.
  • Freeing up time and money for innovation.
  • Hiring and promoting for creativity.
  • Working to eliminate bureaucratic impediments to innovation.
  • Understanding and applying the principles of rapid prototyping and low-cost experi­mentation.

In our experience, most leadership development programs give scant attention to these innovation-enabling attitudes and behaviors. Through selection, training, and feedback, companies must work hard to create a cadre of leaders who are as adept at fostering innovation as they are at running the business.

5. Innovation-friendly management processes

A car is more than its engine. Mate a 500 HP engine with a set of nearly bald tires and most of that power will get wasted. Again, the same is true for innovation. No matter how laudable a company’s innova­tion practices are, if its entire management model hasn’t been tuned for innovation, little of the engine’s power will reach the bottom line.

If, for example, a company’s budgeting process is inherently conservative and makes it difficult for first-line employees to get funding for small-scale experiments, any investment in innovation skills will be wasted. If its product development pro­cess places too much emphasis on removing risk from new launches, few new-to-the-world products will make it to market. If its assessment and compensation system doesn’t reward innovation performance, it will end up with managers who are more bean counters than trailblazers. If it lacks a financial reporting system that tracks innova­tion investment and staffing, no alarm bells will ring when an innovation project gets sacrificed on the altar of quarterly earnings.

The point is, any process that significantly impacts investment, incentives, or mindsets needs to be re-engineered for innovation. Over the past decade, Whirlpool has done exactly that. Its HR leaders, for example, built an innovation-focused assessment exer­cise into the company’s MBA hiring process. Candidates who get invited to the company’s headquarters participate in a multi-day project designed to test their capac­ity to think creatively. On-campus interviews also feature an innovation exer­cise. Whirlpool’s investment process has also been tuned for innovation. Each year, the company devotes a board-sanctioned share of its capital budget—typically around 20%—to projects that are deemed to be truly innovative.

Over the past couple of decades, virtually every company has comprehensively over­hauled its operating model for efficiency and speed. Global supply chains have been optimized, business processes have been outsourced, and huge investments have been made in new IT tools. Thus far, though, few companies have devoted anywhere near this level of effort to retooling their management practices for innovation.

Taking a systemic view

Retooling an organization for innovation is a daunting task. When Whirlpool’s then-chairman, Dave Whitwam, committed himself to building a culture of innovation in 1999, he told his colleagues that the journey would take at least five years, and that during that time innovation would remain his top priority. He made it clear that this wasn’t going to be another program du jour. Moreover, he clearly under­stood the scope of the challenge. “Ultimately,” Whitwam warned his colleagues, “every job and every process will change.” In our experience, there aren’t many CEOs who think that systemically about making innovation a ubiquitous capability.

Typically, when we’re invited into an organization to review its innovation efforts, we find a jumble of tools and methods that are not only incomplete, but also poorly integrated. Individually, each piece makes sense—the crowdsourced idea contest, the internal venture fund, the customer sentiment analysis, the stage-gate product development process—but the whole is less than the parts. It’s as if a dozen differ­ent executives wandered into an auto parts store and each came back with some­thing they thought would be useful in constructing a car. While you can’t build an engine without all the necessary bits and pieces, it’s the integration of those compo­nents that turns a parts bin into a smooth-running machine. That’s why the innova­tion skills a company instills in its employees have to be consistent with its particular definition of innovation, which has to match up with the innovation metrics it selects, which have to be woven into the performance management system. Likewise, all of the ancillary innovation processes must mesh with this set of core components.

No matter how committed, a CEO can’t single-handedly reconstitute a company for innovation. The entire top team has to be on board. Beyond this, the re-engineering efforts need a strong C-suite leader to be responsible for the design and construction of the company’s innovation engine. We call this the “innovation architect.” He or she is a bit like the lead engineer on a car program, whose job is to make sure that all the pieces come together in one coher­ent system. In the case of innovation, this means making sure that innovation is meas­ured in the right way, that employees at all levels have been trained as business innovators and have access to the right insights and tools, that customers and suppli­ers are plugged into the company’s innovation platform, that innovation projects are adequately funded and monitored, that hiring and promotion criteria help to strengthen the company’s innovation “gene pool,” that innovation values get continu­ally reinforced, and that the company’s innovation pipeline is robust enough to meet the company’s growth objectives.

In recent years, a number of companies have appointed a “Chief Innovation Officer” to oversee major new growth initiatives. In our conception the responsibilities of the innovation architect are broader, including not only business develop­ment but competence development as well. The ultimate goal is a company where innovation is “built in,” rather than “bolted on”—where it is instinctive for every individual, and intrinsic to the organization itself.

If your company is really serious about building an innovation engine, then it needs to upgrade everyone’s innovation skills, agree on what counts as innovation, establish comprehen­sive metrics, hold leaders accountable for innovation, and retool its management processes so they foster innovation everywhere, all the time. These can’t be isolated initiatives; they must work in harmony.

Do all this and you’ll have a company that can win, and win again, in the twenty-first century’s creative economy.

Gary Hamel is visiting professor at London Business School and cofounder of The Management Innovation Exchange. His latest book is “What Matters Now.”

Nancy A. Tennant is Vice President for Innovation and Margin Realization at Whirlpool Corporation. Her most recent book is Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed

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11 COMMENTS
  • Arun Sasidharan 3 days ago

    Very Informative….Innovation success or failure is hugely related to the complexity of the business model of any organization. An organization business model may have leaders representing different Industry vertical or sectors and it’s important to analyse, align and centralize these vertical/sector interest to the Innovation framework for an equal participation rather than autonomous initiatives. Designing, Developing and Implementing a systemic Innovation framework may sometimes not produce results / outcomes because of the lack of alignment or agreements within the business model.

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How to Define Innovation Objectives and Innovation Goal

Posted by Joshua Mecael Abuhan on Sun, Apr 3, 2016 @ 08:00 AM

To help facilitate a strong leadership conversation about innovation objectives and innovation goals, here are some examples of why you might choose to enable an innovation engine for your organization:

  • To differentiate your organization in the marketplace
  • To build customer loyalty
  • To identify savings potential
  • To achieve revenue potential
  • To accelerate exploitation of new business ideas worthy of pursuing
  • To a build climate and culture of innovation as per the organization’s innovation mission
  • To become a leading innovation brand for products and services in the markets served and new markets you may serve
  • To improve and expand current products and services
  • To access new technologies
  • To access new markets
  • To identify market trends
  • To improve product quality and associated core processes
  • To improve employee attraction, engagement, and retention
  • To develop new competencies

how to define innovation objectives and goals resized 600

Defining the Innovation Goal

The innovation goal should be visionary and exciting. It should be something that has not seen before, measurable at least once per year (eventually more often), customer focused, and ultimately delivering value (top line, mid line and bottom line).

Following are some examples of innovation goals:

  1. Increase the product pipeline from x to y, to grow the top line by 5% better than your sector’s GDP.
  2. Annually achieve 25% additional margin from new customer-driven services.
  3. Increase the top line every three years by 25%.
  4. Double the top line and bottom line every three years.
  5. Achieve 25% of the top line from new services created within the past 24 months.
  6. Develop new customer-driven products from the top ten customers that will increase net margins by 5% every year.
  7. Build a new S-Curve: Invent a completely new business with a new category of offerings.
  8. Improve customer acquisition ratio by 15% every year for the next three years.
  9. Achieve a customer satisfaction index (CSAT) (or some other best practices method such as net promoter score (NPS) score of 6.0 out of 7.0 (85% or better).
  10. Achieve 25% net profit from 3 new businesses and 25 new current product enhancements in the next five years.
  11. 1% profit before income tax (PBIT) above the current PBIT targets.
  12. Top customers rate us as most innovative in markets and categories we serve.
  13. 2x/3y: Grow 2x every three years, both top line and bottom line.
  14. 3/30/3: Within three years achieve a rate of 30% new revenue from products/services introduced in last three years.
  15. 20/20: 20% of new business (top line) should come from 20% of new customers every year.
  16. 10/20/30: Ten new offerings that yield 20% growth in revenue and 30% growth in profitability.
  17. 50% of all products should be engineered or should include technologies from outside the firm by 2020.

These are good examples of innovation goals to consider. Use the list to engage senior leaders in dialog, debate, and consensus. Then, define innovation goals for your company and for each business unit.

If your innovation initiative is for the entire enterprise, one goal should be directly linked to the business strategy.

If you are rolling out innovation only in your own business unit or information technology department, the goal should be aligned to the area’s business or operational strategy.

Whatever you choose as your innovation goal, it should be fixed for a minimum of three years.  At the end of three years, you can always enhance it or pick an alternative.

The Takeaway

To communicate the innovation agenda to your organization you must first clearly define the innovation strategy, objectives and goals.

Over to you.  Please comment below.

  1. How do you plan to motivate your company’s employees to generate innovative ideas and products?
  2. What is your goal for company innovations in the next 12 months?
  3. What other items would you add to the above lists?

You can download FREE articles at www.desai.com/resources.

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Why Mobile Makers & Innovators in the Philppines are Attracting Foreign Investors

Technology in the hands
Technology in the hands of businessmen

In the Philippines, a lot of foreign venture funds are doubling up their efforts to invest in app makers. Most of them are hoping that the increase of smartphone sales will trigger the need for more home-grown applications.

500 Startups, a San Francisco-based venture capital company, has launched 500 Kulfi fund, named after a well-known Indian sweet dish, to invest in the local makers of mobile applications. Since 2011, 500 Startups has made investments in more than 50 companies in the Philippines, where they have had over 20 deals. After China, Philippines has the second biggest internet population all over the world with over 400 million users. By 2020, the number of smartphones is expected to reach more than 900 million.

Most people in the Philippines use their smartphones in almost every aspect of their lives, even more so than computers. This is very beneficial for app-makers and their respective investors, especially now that smartphone sales in China are slowly declining.

According to Alex Yao, SVP Strategy, Innovation at PhilTech Mobile China will most likely be the remaining growth engine for mobile internet, and given the likeness in terms of its large population, what happened in China could very well repeat itself in the Philippines in upcoming years.

Estate of the art in the design & Innovation of printed circuits according to PhilTech

Technology in the hands
Technology in the hands of businessmen

Interview to Joshua Mecael Abuhan, R&D Manager at PhilTech Innovation.

INTRODUCTION:

PhilTech’s equipment and systems are technologically advanced. Among the applied technologies, which are the most remarkable?

Mainly, this kind of equipment has an advanced design regarding electronics and photonic elements. Lately, there are also two key aspects regarding the electromagnetic impact of printed circuits and the elements and design of programmable logic.

PRINTED CIRCUITS:

Regarding printed circuit boards, how does their design affect your products?

There are two factors that concern the design of the boards: the higher connection pad density required involves challenges in the design and manufacture of circuits with a high number of layers. Another challenge is to transport high-speed digital data signals preserving their form to prevent errors. This is called signal integrity.

But this part just interconnects components and does not make any other specific function, does it??

That is true. But sometimes it may be a limiting factor of the design performance. Likewise, its development must be in line with that of the components with a new packaging, such as BGA.

Why is this part strategic for designs?

It could limit our transmission and process capacity.

Does PhilTech manufacture these circuits?

We do not need to. In Asia there are very competent companies in this field with which we collaborate closely. PhilTech prepares the design and selects materials.

Where is this technology going?

The materials used and manufacture processes are continuously evolving in this field. However, the most radical trend is going towards the integration of complex functions on silicon, this is, the use of integrated circuits adapted to the applications.

PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC:

What do you call “programmable logic circuits”?

They are components that harbor a large amount of simple-logic functional cells that may be programmed and interconnected to perform a function jointly.

In our case, we also use those equipped with circuits suitable for the speed we are processing.

How does the use of digital programmable parts improve your products?

The production of functional blocks adapted to our data transmission and processing purpose, together with the integration of all the design logical functions (microprocessor, interfaces, communications…).

Which is the possible alternative to these circuits?

So far, for these speeds, the only alternative was the use of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). It involved issues of availability and adaptation to the amounts required for their use.

Which are the advantages of your approach to the use of specific circuits?

We are more versatile and independent of other manufacturers. Our design cycles are shorter and their use is very well adapted to our projects and manufacture batches.

How is the design process of these elements?

First, we analyze the functions we must carry out in order to select afterwards the appropriate circuit in terms of capacity and size, as well as the processing speed.

Source text: PhilTechInnovation.com.ph