The best industrial products rarely begin as ideas on a whiteboard. More often, they start with a challenge in the field — a cable that fails too quickly, an environment that existing products can't withstand, or a market need that hasn't been fully addressed. Successful innovation starts with identifying those opportunities and then combining customer insights with engineering expertise to create something better.
In this video, our experts discuss how new cable solutions are developed, from identifying market opportunities and gathering customer feedback to refining existing products for improved performance. Watch the video to learn how listening to customers and solving real-world challenges helps drive industrial cable innovation.
Transcript:
[On-screen text: What's it like behind the scenes of new product development?]
Behind the scenes, a lot of it is opportunity. Solving a problem. Some of it is also understanding the market. You know, do we see a place in the market where we can fit in? When I think of that, I think of what we're doing right now with medium voltage, for example, or the railway, which two, three, or even four years ago, we had no participation in. We saw an opening to be successful and so we took it.
Sometimes, you're successful with the product and sometimes we're not. No doubt about it, but it's, in a sense, it's doing all the homework (or as much homework as you can) to put yourself in that position to win, but there are no guarantees. Some of these ideas also come from internally.
We have a program we call "voice of the customer" where the sales reps are actively engaging our customers for things that they can't get anywhere. Or they're able to say, "hey, here's some wins we had, can these wins be transferred to another to another plant?" So we'll assess if there is an accumulation where we can build a product line out of all of these different plants that are using a similar product. So that's what feeds the ideas that come into the new product development.
The other thing is that we're sort of a company that comes up with the better mousetrap. There's a product out there that a customer is currently using and they have sort of inherent weaknesses, you know. So how do we look at those products and how do we come out with something better? By talking to the
customer. They have concerns about the performance of the product, it doesn't last very long, because of the environment, it tends to dry out, crack, and fail fairly quickly. We can take that and apply our knowledge of materials and construction and come out with something that'll last longer and satisfy them.
We used to call it sort of the bleeding edge of technology. You don't want to be on that, but you can be on the back end of that and take existing products and just make them better. I think we've done a really good job at that.
