A company’s best-kept secret may in fact be someone else’s.
There was once a company that attempted to patent a process for the precise measurement of the knee joint prior to surgery without resorting to expensive CT scans. The process was ingenious in its simplicity, combining low-tech hardware with a custom software solution to build a 3-D image from a few standard 2-D x-rays.
Clever? Yes. Innovative? Yes. Original? No.
It turned out that a method for converting 2-D images into 3-D images had been developed and patented decades earlier for a completely different application. What’s notable about this example is that this company didn’t set out to rip off another’s invention—it had unknowingly recreated a previous invention in another field.
This example illustrates the thin ice upon which many companies can inadvertently find themselves as the partition between hardware and software continues to shift in favor of the latter. A software algorithm that can perform a desired function in place of a hardware component can yield significant cost savings and dramatically shorten time to market. For companies eager to compete in a market as cost-sensitive as consumer electronics, achieving desired functionality and device efficacy with a software solution in lieu of hardware can be a Holy Grail.
Software, of course, can have a relatively high upfront development expense. But once it’s in production, the on-going maintenance is far less costly than continuing to churn out in high volume an expensive hardware component which it can replace.
Take, for example, a sophisticated sensor that’s costly to produce, fragile, and required in large volumes. This could be anything from a sensor in a weigh scale to one in a steam iron that reads heat and pressure to adjust the temperature setting. That same sensor can be replaced with one that’s far more economical, robust, and easier to manufacture, if combined with a software algorithm.
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