Innovation as a strategy.

Innovation as a strategy.

The brief of the company «Nedap» gives the following definition of its activities: «Nedap is an innovative commercial enterprise.» For my part, I am ready to fully subscribe to this phrase, which, as it seems to me, expresses the basis of the modern mechanism for the emergence of innovations in any market, including the security systems market.

Undoubtedly, for any innovation to enter the market as a consumer product, a solid commercial basis is necessary — the entrepreneur's vision of potential demand for the new product among the intended target audience. Therefore, one should not take seriously statements about various technological breakthroughs and all sorts of revolutions when describing a new product. Of course, no entrepreneur will invest his or her funds or the investor's funds in innovation for the sake of innovation. I am deeply convinced that the number of new solutions and products that a customer can see on our market exactly corresponds to the number of manufacturing companies motivated by the market situation to produce them.
Another thing is that in the reality around us, the real sector of the economy, associated with any production, is everywhere giving up its positions to financial markets with their colorful world of forecasts, futures and stock quotes. The security systems market was no exception, where in the pre-crisis era, large companies were actively absorbing small ones and no less actively merging with their own kind. According to expert assessments of the participants in the financial battles themselves, this was often done «in reserve», with the aim of obtaining some abstract synergy in long-term financial periods. Naturally, after each such high-profile process, analytical articles appeared, which provided arguments in favor of company A buying company B, since the latter received at its disposal unique technologies for the production of product X, which will undoubtedly bring it additional investment attractiveness for its subsequent purchase by banking group Z, and will also add competitive advantages in the fight for the market segment with companies C and D. It began to seem that creating those very innovations for many large players does not make sense, they can simply be bought. The crisis that followed the era of financial glamour harshly and unambiguously offered companies to survive in a specific short-term period, often abandoning all the financial burden they had bought on the spot to the mercy of market fate.
In this situation, in my opinion, the winners were those companies that were able to offer the market an innovative idea, their intangible asset, having managed to spend a minimum amount of additional and attracted resources to obtain it.
The motto of the Nedap company «Innovation as a strategy» very clearly defines the business model of its work for many years. The company has always tried to differentiate itself from competitive offers precisely by promptly introducing relevant innovative solutions and technologies.
Thus, in the late 70s, the Nedap company, having become one of the pioneers in the development and implementation of RFID technology in security systems, was the first to develop a card for an access control system using Hands Free technology without a battery inside with a reading distance of up to 60 cm on the original Nedap reader.
The growth of widespread commercial use of modern network technologies based on TCP/IP (Internet) protocol, as well as the increasingly widespread use of distributed intelligence systems at the end of the last century, determined the next vector of the company's development for the coming years. In the early 2000s, Nedap, having made serious risky investments, developed the AEOS access control system — a fundamentally new IP-oriented security system with a modular principle of building software and hardware.
Over the past time, the AEOS system has been successfully installed at several hundred large and very large facilities. Step by step, in close cooperation with its partners and clients around the world, it expands the functionality of the system, taking the focus on creating the most adaptive solutions in accordance with the requirements of the security policy of a specific customer. Assessing the near future of the technical security systems market in this vein, the Nedap company sees it primarily as a software market, the influence of which on the functionality of the system is already becoming decisive. Like a modern PC user, the customer will be able to choose for installation software components necessary to solve the problems of ensuring the security of him, and not of some abstract object. IP technology itself will most likely be considered by consumers simply as the most standardized and utilitarian means of communication. And nothing more.