Automation starts in your heart and your head

Why start automating? Why choose to digitise? We often think about saving money or making your process less vulnerable. Thinking from the customer's point of view is better. What does the customer want and what do you have to offer?

It takes courage to change course. First of all, you need to have the courage to reassess difficult and complex processes. Real innovation comes about when you are brave enough to step out of reality and start thinking freely about where you want to go, thinking from the customer's point of view, what is really needed to make it work. Dare to think 'Out of the box'. But a brilliant solution isn't there yet, even if it's fairly simple to implement. Certainly not if your innovation shakes reality to its foundations.

Although automation and digitisation can help you enormously to make processes more efficient and respond differently, innovation tends to take place at an exasperatingly slow pace. 

Why is that? Because time and time again it turns out that not everyone is ready for change and truly innovative ideas. Sometimes established balances of power get in the way. Or they are unable to fit the change into current policy. People do not want to interfere with existing processes. The inability of the 'Outbreak Management Team' (OMT) to expand the testing capacity for corona testing is painfully illustrative of this. Solutions are available, but existing power relations are blocking the path to upscaling and change.

Fear blocks a lot. Dare to counteract it. With confidence. 

Innovative ideas can only flourish if there is room for change and innovation in policy. Sometimes you have to make fundamental choices. And yes, that also requires courage.

Pieter Vos
Director Nutrilab