By Gio Laporta, inventor and innovator of Smart Ready.

I am writing to applaud Ryan Bresling from Cherwell Windows on his comment last week: ‘Has innovation dried up in the UK?’

It’s reassuring to see others raising the issue, as it’s one that is super close to my heart. One point I would like to challenge Ryan on is that I don’t believe it’s geography restricting innovation. It’s the industry as a whole in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. This industry has been around too long for products to continue to look and perform in the same way they have done for the last 50 years. What’s the point? We all need to go home if all we’re doing is slapping a new type of coating on a standard product, upgrading material specification on a hinge, or launching a new shade of grey and calling it ‘ground-breaking’.

With most product launches, like Ryan, I see the same things come out – often just change for change’s sake, additions and aesthetics that don’t do anything to improve the mechanical operation of a product and are most of the time just unnecessary.

Let’s ask a radical question: When it comes to innovation, rather than adding a new feature, why don’t we strip things back and embrace simplicity?

The quick answer to this question is because making design simple is hard to do. I often get asked, after 50 years in play, why are there still product feature gaps in the industry’s product offering, which I see as obvious?

And how is it that I can see the gaps clearly as an innovator (when I’m looking) and no one else can? Is there an indifference towards innovation because, ‘we’ve got what already works?’

It’s fascinating to me that we aren’t seeing great innovation, in particular, simple, stripped back innovation. Are we overthinking design? Are we thinking more is better? Are we just recruiting inexperienced product designers, or keeping a hold of experienced product designers that can only look back?

If we get a product right and make investment in simple innovation, the rewards can be huge. It seems to me that companies, (many with deep pockets both in the UK and Europe), aren’t chasing each other to be the best, but to be the same. Very specifically I am talking about real product innovation. This is definitely not the way I see design. In fact, for me it’s a not seeing thing, it’s a feeling thing. I feel the innovation.

My inspiration for innovation has always been to create better solutions that can be sold as added sales value. They can do this because the end result of what I create is something that points to real differentiation that adds value to the business and to the consumers’ life. And it’s a forever change, by which I mean, a disruptive innovation that changes the product category entirely and forever.

Ryan comments that ‘with a little luck, we may see new products coming online this year’. Speaking for Sac and Smart Ready, new products are coming online this year, not with a little luck, but with the firm intention of changing the market forever. Yes, I am confident, but I have good reason to be.

Come and see us on stand H11 at the FIT Show.