Inkjet Needs to 'Up' its Commercial Game
Richard Darlings role at Ricoh is Strategic Business Development for Industrial Print
According to the Future of Inkjet Survey 2020, conducted by FM Future in partnership with Ricoh, confidence that we have in the future growth of our (inkjet) technology remains high. This is really positive of course. But this has been the case for some time now. Yet has inkjet really penetrated into new markets and matched the expectations we had for growth back in 2014?
The reality is, probably not. So why is this?
In my view, the inkjet community is too caught up in technical conversations with itself and with customer R&D technical people who are not empowered to make a strategic investment in new technology.
As a result, I think it is taking too long for inkjet to be accepted by the mainstream in these industrial markets. We cannot wait forever! These companies seem to be imprisoned by their own fear of disruption and are waiting too long for the risk to be entirely removed. We have to help them.
The thing is with a complex inkjet project, each installation is different, so perfection doesn’t exist. And this is not because inkjet will never be good enough, but that this is entirely missing the point. Inkjet in itself is not disruptive. This disruption is in their mind. We know inkjet enables and compliments, so it does not have to be considered a disruptive technology, and this fear is really holding back progress.
I presented this theme at the IJC in October last year. Some people didn’t like to hear it, but I think I am speaking the truth. We do talk to ourselves too much. We need to upscale the conversation to a commercial level to get the necessary buy-in and to generate the right level of confidence. What was also interesting is that I also had people coming up to me and saying ‘finally someone has said it’. We will be taking up this theme at Ricoh’s Inkjet Generation Summit 4-5 March in Telford and also showing some of our key case-studies. More information on this will follow next week!
Anyhow, of course, the technical challenges remain. But I am really confident that we have the necessary infrastructure and expertise to solve these, at least we do at Ricoh, so we can together take inkjet onto another level in terms of use and as a key technology for industrial printing.
We, as an industry need to build better and stronger bridges into these new markets. The fact is that once Inkjet’s economic benefits are clearly made and we engage with the people at a higher commercial level, more and more acceptance will be achieved.
Connect with Richard here. To email him here.
