Padmakumar Nair, CEO & Co-founder of Ennoventure Inc.
At the turn of the century, when cars started to become ubiquitous, Henry Ford is believed to have remarked, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
A century of improvements has made automobiles safer, comfortable, powerful and efficient. But is it enough? Conventional wisdom would say that we have hit limits on how much we can improve automotives running on combustion engines. For instance, combustion engines have only 30%-35% efficiency according to AAA. We have accepted that around 70% is lost. When did we humans stop at accepting 30% efficiency? The answer is that we don’t.
Which is why, at the turn of the next century, electric cars started to build momentum, and companies like Tesla sparked the imagination of millions of customers. There is little doubt that electric cars will completely replace combustion cars in the near future.
Changing The Paradigm
Quantum leaps happen when iterative improvements start to bring diminishing returns and companies attack the problem in new ways. From the Wright brothers to desktop computing and mobile, cloud and more—value comes from changing the paradigm.
To completely rethink conventional wisdom is scary. There is a confluence of challenges—technology, awareness, scalability, distribution, education, adoption, usability, sales and pricing. You need to solve everything to solve any one thing.
The Impact Of Counterfeit Products
What do we learn from the rise of electric vehicles? The electric car was measurably, visibly, better—better acceleration, less pollution, less maintenance, automatic regenerative braking and more. People wanted to use it, adopt it, own it.
Yet, amid progress, an alarming acceptance of deaths and illnesses stemming from counterfeit products has emerged. For example, WHO puts the annual death toll from counterfeit drugs at around 1 million.
At my company, Ennoventure, we tackle a challenge that has existed as long as humans have conducted commerce: counterfeiting. It has remained an undefeated challenge for so long that it has almost become accepted, much like the combustion engine’s efficiency.
Brands are often caught between expensive solutions that require huge capital expenditures and operating expenditures while (rarely) improving outcomes by a few percentage points—or giving up and accepting counterfeits as a cost of doing business. The supply chain continues to be riddled with weak points for the entry of counterfeits into the system.
Counterfeiters move faster and use better technology to replicate and defeat the latest systems. And consumers are intimidated and unaware of how to identify traditional counterfeit solutions, or worse, use a fake product that has a fake replica of the anti-counterfeit solution.
Building A Solution
My company’s goal was to build a solution to defeat the most advanced counterfeiters while making it the easiest authentication system in the world. The solution needed to work across continents and countries while eliminating local logistical requirements. The solution needed to scale instantly, while reducing the cost to a level that supported the most affordable product. The solution had to be deployed with no change to any process, but instantly increase validation checkpoints by at least 100x.
And it had to be instantly, easily usable by any human above the age of 5, with zero learning curve. And despite the cutting-edge technology, the overall cost for the client had to come down compared to the oldest, most affordable technology available.
Here is what I learned from the process:
1. Build scalability into day one architecture.
Entrepreneurs who are looking to start solving big, global problems should embrace platforms that are both easy to set up and scale. For example, we embraced the cloud from day one, helping us scale rapidly.
2. Disrupt the (digital) beginning to reduce turbulence.
Start by working backward from the consumer to find the earliest, least costly disruption point. For example, integrating our purely digital solution at the design stage saved downstream change costs.
When designing for customers, aim for early digital integration, avoiding hardware and manufacturing complexities. Today, digital solutions often fit seamlessly into existing processes, avoiding the need for behavior change, system adoption or retooling/retraining.
3. Leverage consumer grade hardware.
Consumers carry powerful smartphones ready for photos, storage, internet and on-device computing. The ready-made platform includes browsers and app stores that take care of compatibility. Using smartphones rather than custom devices helped us save significant costs while providing scalability.
4. Scale users to scale data.
Empower more users with existing devices to generate more data and insights. Tap into the existing user base with ready-made devices to increase data volume, enhance decision accuracy and access real-time data, driving innovation.
5. Dashboard wide and early to demonstrate value.
Your solution might be delivering value, but you might not be demonstrating it to the right stakeholders. When taking an innovation-led approach, we often miss the need to showcase the outcome in a manner to stakeholders who may not be very technical or too busy to go through reels of data. A dashboard that the client can see and understand can exponentially increase goodwill.
In fact, a great dashboard shows the overall value that your solution provides, which can drive greater investment by the client, and higher profits for you.
6. Security is a strategic priority.
Security must be integral to your solution design from day one, not an afterthought. In our case, we were fighting head-on with counterfeiters who remained in the shadow. You shouldn’t consider security only after you have built traction and scale, because it becomes substantially more difficult to implement and maintain security.
A secure solution can be a great strategic advantage once the market matures, as your competitors struggle to retrofit security into their solutions after it has hit the market.
Competitors or bad actors don’t check for our weak spots until we start becoming a threat to their business—by which time it might be too late to retrofit security into your business. Make security a priority for long term success so that your weak points don’t grow with your scale.
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