Most employees have had at least one great idea in their time about a product or service that would make life easier in the workplace, yet few of these ideas ever get to see the light of day.
That’s mainly because many people and businesses lack the knowledge to bring their idea to market, or they are put off by the perceived high cost of research and development (R&D) – an absolute necessity when developing any new product.
Despite such hindrances, print’s track record of innovation is strong. After all, the printing press is the greatest invention of all time according to some people. But in recent years, new product innovations have been relatively thin on the ground compared with other business sectors, and those that have hit the market have taken a while to gain a foothold – or disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared.
So, given the high risk and the high costs associated with the creation of a new product or service (coupled with the UK’s complex and expensive patent protection system) why bother developing new ideas in the first place?
Primarily because the business case for creating new products is extremely compelling. Innovations can open up additional profit avenues, either by bringing your business to the attention of new markets or clients, or through the licensing of successful products to other printers or to clients. Possessing this kind of intellectual property also makes for a more robust business model: rather than simply manufacturing, and being paid for the manufactured goods, printers gain revenue that continues to come in whether they manufacture or not. In addition, a reputation for being innovative – especially if you’re renowned for coming up with solutions to your customers’ problems – is a huge draw for clients, and provides a strong point of difference in a highly commoditised market.
One firm that has worked the latter factor to its benefit is Milton Keynes-based Loudwater. Through offshoot companies, such as Atomic MK, the firm has launched a number of innovations that have helped put it on the map. These range from Eazyrizer, a self-assembling point-of-sale system powered by elastic bands (pictured), to Plastiscene, a division that specialises in printing high-quality litho on plastic and other unusual substrates.
Responding to the market
Jennifer Deacon, Loudwater group marketing director, says that the firm takes new product development extremely seriously and has invested a lot of time and money into making sure that the products work. To this end, the firm has a monthly meeting in which new product ideas are discussed. It also formed a cardboard engineering team solely dedicated to the creation of new product innovations.
“Atomic’s selling point is that it’s innovative so we have to keep that stance and keep innovating, otherwise we’ve just got old products,” explains Deacon. She adds that the firm’s sales team bring in requests for new products all the time. This kind of dialogue is crucial, because it’s important that what’s created matches the market’s needs.
Innovation need not be product-focused, but can also be a service. King’s Lynn-based book printer Biddles was responding to market demand when it launched Publisher’s Choice – a short-run book printing service. Rod Willett, Biddles managing director, explains that the service was introduced in an effort to help academic publishers suffering from declining sales – a fact that was leading them to reduce run lengths, despite the fact that the longer the run length, the cheaper the unit cost. “We wanted to find a way to let publishers print the number of books that made economic sense for them,” says Willett.
The basic concept of Publisher’s Choice is simple: it utilises digital print technology and an online customer interface from which orders can be placed. But it’s the pricing strategy that’s the real innovation. “If, for example, a publisher requests 750 copies of a publication with a unit cost of £2, in the first six to nine months they might only make 350 sales. However, if you matched your print run more closely to your sales pattern then typically the unit costs would double. Under our model it’s the same price whichever route you take,” Willett says.
Chris Timm, marketing director of Kettering-based Sterling Solutions, does a lot of work with the education sector. A number of clients were telling him that their budgets for producing material, such as prospectuses, were coming under increasing pressure. Timm put this together with Sterling’s digital press and came up with a solution for the universities’ declining budgets and his press’ under-utilisation.
Christened MyProspectus, the service was launched two years ago. Potential students fill out a prospectus request on the web, and based on the information they provide, a personalised, highly-targeted digitally-printed brochure is dispatched. For some clients, savings on print costs of up to 50% are being achieved.
Jim Parkin, director of Huddersfield-based large-format printer Leach Colour (see case study above) believes that companies should constantly challenge themselves to come up with new ideas.
“We have an innovation committee that transcends the whole hierarchy of the company and we set ourselves a target of introducing at least four innovations a year,” he says.
He adds that 90-95% of what the firm dreams up never makes it to market, but those that do are successful because Leach involves its customers throughout the product’s development. “And we don’t just talk to the people who deal with print all day long,” he explains. “We get everybody involved at all levels – from the shop floor to the board of directors – because we have to make sure that what we are developing is a real solution to a real problem, otherwise it won’t work. Innovation doesn’t mean gimmickry – it means solution.”
Another firm with a strong track record of innovation is Bury St Edmunds-based Denny Brothers. Among its successful innovations are Promaxx – a system that allows the creation of pre-cut desktop products such as business cards – and Fix-a-Form, a multi-page label format. The firm’s managing director Barry Denny agrees with Parkin that solving a problem is a sure way of securing customers.
Try, try and try again
“In the past we’ve come up with some really good ideas and tried to sell them but they never seemed to sell as well as we had hoped. We’ve had much more success when someone has come up to us and said ‘can you solve this problem for us?’”
Once you have your innovative product, it’s wise to protect your ideas to stop other firms from reverse-engineering and cashing in on your work. Denny Bros has spent a lot of money on R&D and its portfolio of patents, but on the flipside, has also licensed some of its products overseas, making it more profitable.
With regard to patents, Denny remarks that it is always best to seek expert advice. “There’s an art to getting the patent right. They can be broad but weak or narrow and strong – it’s the patent agent’s job to get the balance right.”
But whichever form of patent you opt for, they don’t come cheap. European patent protection is likely to set you back between £5,000-£10,000 and it could cost as much as £40,000 to protect your idea across Europe, the US and the Far East.
However, the ramifications of not footing the patent bill could prove costly. Take the case of one British manufacturer who understandably prefers to remain anonymous: this manufacturer shelled out £100,000 in development costs for a new machine over a 10-year period. Although early versions of the machine were patented at a cost of £12,000, the firm could not afford to patent-protect later models, due to cashflow problems. Sure enough, a rival company brought its own device to market that bore remarkable similarities to the original model.
Despite these pitfalls, the key with innovations or inventions is not be deterred. “Keep trying and keep pursuing your ideas,” advises Barry Denny. “Don’t just go back to being a general printer. We’ve had a lot of projects that didn’t work out right and a few that have been very successful. The key is to keep trying.”
HOW TO: DEVELOP YOUR PRODUCT
• Having had the ‘eureka’ moment and come up with a good idea, you could appoint an educational partner to undertake the subsequent R&D on your behalf, or just help you with the trickier details. The University of Leeds’ Centre for Industrial Collaboration in Digital Printing or the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating are two centres of print excellence that collaborate with external businesses on product development
• Finding the money can be tricky. The government-sponsored Businesslink website (www.businesslink.gov.uk) has a section devoted to R&D, which contains a raft of useful information and a list of bodies that you can approach for grant funding
• Once the product is ready for commercial launch, a visit to the Patent Office’s website (www.patent.gov.uk) is essential. The normal fee to process a UK patent application is £200. It’s free to apply for the granting of a patent but it costs £30 (application fee) for a preliminary examination, £100 for a search and £70 for a substantive examination. If your product or service has a trade name then you should get trademark protection; you can apply online for £200. Alternatively you could employ a patent lawyer or company to do all of the above for you
• Regardless of whether or not you employ a patent lawyer from the off, you should always use one for drawing up your patent application because it must be as watertight as possible –
a DIY job will not suffice. And don’t forget, if you modify the machine in any way then you will have to apply for a new patent
CASE STUDY: LEACH COLOUR
Huddersfield-based Leach Colour identified demand for a no-nonsense display system that
was simple to install and update, always looked good, and was inexpensive to distribute and maintain.
The firm, which consciously made the decision to be innovative for fear of becoming a ‘me-too’ manufacturer driven purely by price, was already doing lots of display work for retail clients and realised that the crux of the problem was the time and money it cost to install in-store graphics. After eighteen months of R&D work, which involved not just talking to print buyers at Leach’s retail customers but also talking to retail workers themselves, the firm devised Stik.
Stik consists of two elements: a permanent magnetic backboard that is installed by Leach’s team
of fitters, and a flexible PVC graphic panel with a special ferrous coating that can be installed by anyone.
“They’re really easy to put up,” explains Leach director Jim Parkin. “You don’t need ladders or a specialist installation team. The graphic panel is delivered in a tube and a shop worker can instantly apply it to the backboard, which saves both time and money.”
Since its introduction, Stik has been a major hit. Children’s goods retailer Mamas and Papas, which worked closely with Leach on the innovation, is already rolling it out across its portfolio of stores, while last year supermarket giant Asda’s George clothing brand also signed up to use Stik in its stores.
