RICOH

RICOH 

 

I joined Ricoh in the early 1970s as an engineer and was part of the team that developed the first high-speed digital office fax machine, the RIFAX 600s. In Japanese, it was nicknamed the ippunki or 'one minute machine' because it took one minute to send a single A4-size page from Tokyo to New York. After that, I was project leader on a range of business teams, an experience that taught me a valuable lesson - innovative technology for its own sake is worthless. The only worthwhile innovations are those that offer new customer value.

Many people tend to think that an innovation has to include new technology, but it's simply not true. Take the iPod as an example. It combined pre-existing technologies to offer an irresistible proposition: all your music, pictures and documents stored on a single device. It wasn't about new technology, but about a new form of customer value.

This is our product development philosophy at Ricoh. Over the years, we've seen copiers transform into multifunction devices that could also print and scan. Now, with the addition of more and more software functionality, we are seeing these devices transform again into office communication hubs.

For example, in Australia last year, our local Business Solutions Group developed ESA TransFormer, an embedded Java solution that, very simply, converts scanned hard copy documents into useable electronic files. Of course, OCR scanning is not a new technology, but by embedding this application directly into an MFP, we've been able offer customers a new form of value. We want our machines to do more, so our customers don't have to.

It's important not to forget that customers are actually the source of many of the best ideas. It's by analysing how our customers work that our worldwide technology centres can come up with tailored solutions to optimise workflow in specific environments. Our goal is to deliver solutions to problems that our customers haven't even recognised as problems.

I truly believe that any business product developed must improve office efficiency or boost productivity. After all, wasn't that the great promise of the technological revolution?

- Shiro Kondo, CEO, Ricoh Corporation

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