Why Better Is Not Good Enough

New analytical instruments claiming better performance are regularly introduced to the market but often fail to gain adoption. This isn’t necessarily because the claims made about the offered product are false (although sometimes that can be the case) or that the price is too high relative to the value derived from it (although sometimes that can be the case too) but rather because there are numerous scenarios in which better just isn’t good enough. Here are three reasons why it can be an uphill battle to introduce even a genuinely superior solution.

First, if a new product has only slightly or moderately improved performance compared to the incumbent, that improvement may not be sufficient to overcome the costs and risks of change or the skepticism that the advantage can be sustained over time or once deployed more broadly. Even when the improvement is significant it might not add value in the context of the application need. For example, if a measurement already has enough spectral resolution to resolve the peaks in a Raman spectrum, improving the resolution may be a cosmetic improvement but won’t result in any change to the measurement outcome.

A consequence of the above obstacle is that new instruments are often directed toward the hardest problems – the ones that haven’t been adequately addressed by other products. This puts the new instrument at a major disadvantage when being tested and evaluated to prove its worth. A similar situation arises when new medical technologies are initially used only on patients who are too sick for or who failed to respond to other treatments and subsequent poor patient outcomes are unfairly attributed to the new technology.

Finally, ‘better’ is a relative term while ‘different’ is absolute. One might debate whether the results from a new instrument are better but usually everyone will agree that they’re different, and if they are better then they’ll definitely be different! This causes major difficulty in determining the correct reference to compare against, how to interpret and apply the results, and how to validate for regulatory purposes.

At Tornado, we recognize these challenges and focus on providing an order of magnitude improvement for specific applications where there will be an economic advantage from improved quality and/or efficiency – so that better will not just be good enough, but great.

As published in European Pharmaceutical Review, Volume 21, Issue 4

Aaron Weinroth is the Chief Marketing Officer at Tornado Spectral Systems where he oversees many aspects of Tornado's technology commercialization activities including product management, marketing, and the intellectual property portfolio. Prior to his role at Tornado, Aaron served in senior business and engineering capacities developing and introducing new products in the medical device and imaging industries for both small early-stage growth organizations and the large global corporations that acquired them.