Accelerating the speed of innovation

Being first to market with a new product or feature is a critical differentiator in many industries. Being first often means capturing greater market share or establishing leadership and dominance in a new market. It also leads to faster return on investment and greater overall profitability.  

From a design standpoint, the difference between being the innovation leader and having a late-to-market “me-too” product might be just a matter of a few weeks. The more a development team can reduce its design cycle, the greater its chance of taking the lead in the market.  

Innovation, however, takes time. Development teams need to be able to explore new ideas and test different options. This is often an iterative process — the team implements a design, tests it, improves it and then begins the cycle again. The faster a team can iterate, the faster it can complete a design that is ready for market.

Time-to-market, then, is impacted significantly by how quickly a development team can iterate designs. A team that can iterate a design cycle in a few hours can innovative several times faster than a team that takes a week per cycle. The ability to iterate faster gives OEMs greater flexibility. They can use faster iteration to deliver a product to market more quickly. Alternatively, they can add a few design cycles to focus on refinement — for example, reducing power consumption or product size. Another option is to optimize a design for price by taking time to evaluate different components that can reduce your overall bill of materials (BOM) cost.                

Accelerating the speed of innovation for your own development team begins by identifying unnecessary delays in your design process. For example, working with a new technology often comes with a learning curve. Anything you can do to reduce the time it takes to become familiar with a new technology or component will speed your time-to-market. Arrow is unique from other suppliers because they have expert engineers in-house who can help you get up to speed with a new technology. They can also work with you to help you source the right components and tools to maximize your productivity.                

Arrow engineers can provide insight and advice at all stages of design, including helping you optimize your design in terms of performance, power and cost. They can suggest components that allow you to evaluate different tradeoffs for your application. They can provide guidance so that working with a new part won’t slow you down.

Slow shipping is another major source of delay for design cycles. The longer it takes to source and then ship a component, the more your iterative process will be delayed. Consider the difference in efficiency and speed of innovation between a team that gets new parts tomorrow and a team that has to wait until the beginning of next week.                

Given the high cost in terms of time-to-market, shipping delays simply don’t make sense. However, if you order a component with fast shipping, the accounting department usually wants to know why you didn’t order your part three days ago so you could use regular shipping methods instead. What they don’t understand is that you didn’t know you needed that part until 3:00 this afternoon. And so, for the cost of a few dollars, your time-to-market takes a three-day hit. Iterate with that kind of delay a few times and you’ve lost weeks to your competitors.       

Arrow understands the benefit of getting the parts you need when you need them. That’s why every order over $20 of in-stock components gets free overnight shipping to all North American locations. Arrow also keeps over 3.8 billion components in stock, ready to ship, so that nothing slows down your design process. And you can order comparable parts from different vendors all in the same order so you can quickly and easily evaluate which component will serve you the best.

Your development team needs every advantage it can get to speed design cycles. With Arrow, you won’t lose time waiting on critical parts to arrive. And you can always depend upon Arrow’s commitment to provide you with the technology support you need to help you drive innovation forward, day after day, week after week and year after year.

Looking to speed up the production on your current design? Arrow can help with fast, free overnight shipping. Shop now.