Building the Case for Unassailable ROI - Part 2

ROI-Infused Innovation

I believe it's important to recognize that while ROI is a calculation, it is also a culture. Both startups and corporations that consistently deliver successful innovation projects have a culturally embedded focus that incorporates an ROI-centric mindset into every phase of execution. In fact, I would go so far as to state that startups are the corporate embodiment of innovation. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that just as 90% of startups fail, 90% of innovation projects fail to deliver the promised level of ROI. I would argue that both startups and innovation projects fail for the same reason: a lack of product-market fit, a mismatch between the innovation and the business need. Or put another way, a failure to deliver ROI.By infusing these six hallmarks of innovation centric ROI into your startup or corporate culture, you can help to ensure that your projects not only meet but exceed ROI expectations. This approach fosters sustainable growth, operational efficiency, and continuous value creation, positioning your startup or initiative as a model for ROI Centric Innovation.

In this context, I want to discuss six factors that innovators, both corporate and within the startup community, should evaluate to ensure the critical match between innovation and business need. This will help execute successful product-market fit and better assess if investment costs can deliver a compelling ROI.

ROI-Infused Innovation Minimizes the Operational Costs of Change

Does the solution minimize the operational costs of change? Does it integrate with existing operating processes and tools? What is the burden for training, process change, risk management, data migration, compliance, security, integration, and productivity lost during the transition?

This is particularly challenging on the airfield, where the desire to think outside the box is constrained by regulatory requirements and processes. For the Illuminex AI team, maximizing ROI for our airfield inspection platform meant developing solutions that could be seamlessly incorporated into existing and approved airfield inspection Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), minimizing training requirements, and offering non-disruptive integration with existing airfield inspection and work order management software.

As a result, while we can support deployment on drones or autonomous vehicles, we had to build a solution that could be deployed on existing airfield inspection vehicles driven by technical inspectors at speeds of up to 80 km/h, accommodating an inspection width of up to 100 feet in a single pass. To minimize operator retraining, we developed an intuitive user interface that required little to no training to operate. Finally, we developed an API that could integrate our AI-based detections with existing airfield inspection work order management systems.

ROI-Infused Innovation Maximizes Economies of Scope

ROI-infused innovation seeks to maximize economies of scope. Economies of scope refer to leveraging investments to accomplish the widest possible range of value for your target customer. Put another way, is the ROI of the proposed solution foundational (something that you can build upon) or final (the solution lacks the ability to cascade additional ROI over time)?

Within the context of AI for airfield operations, it's about leveraging investment in sensors, edge computing, bandwidth, cloud infrastructure, maintenance, and administration to deliver the maximum number of potential use cases while minimizing investment in sensors, bandwidth, and networking. At Illuminex AI, this led to three key design decisions: mobility, sensor fusion, and support for concurrent and diverse inspections.

The Mobility Requirement: The deployment of an inspection system using fixed location systems would require approximately one camera for every 400 feet, simulated in Figure 1. This means that to cover a single 200-foot by 10,000-foot runway would take more than 25 cameras. For a typical hub airport, extending coverage to all airfield surfaces would take more than 2,000 individual cameras, driving several million dollars in upfront capital costs to install the sensors along with the required power and network connectivity. In contrast, we designed a fully mobile inspection system that has an upfront cost for sensors and compute in the range of $30,000 per equipped vehicle. Assuming one equipped vehicle per runway, a hub airport with five runways could achieve complete surface coverage for an upfront cost of $150,000 versus the multiple million-dollar upfront cost for a fixed sensor solution.

Figure 1: Sensor Fusion allows us to combine the power of multiple sensor types such as LiDAR, visible light cameras, thermal cameras for perception with GPS to dramatically expand both the range and accuracy of inspections. Finally, concurrent inspections give us the ability to conduct multiple inspection types using the same equipment at the same time. This means as we continue to expand our offerings, foreign object and debris, intrusion, surface condition, lighting, markings, signs, everything within the range of view of the sensor is simultaneously inspected by stacking AI models into a common architecture.

ROI-Infused Innovation Leverages Economies of Scale

Leveraging economies of scale differs from economies of scope and refers to the ability to leverage the impact of volume to drive continued improvement in price/performance. While there are solutions that require proprietary technology, these are exceptions. As a rule, most innovative solutions leverage primarily off-the-shelf solutions that maximize economies of scale.

At Illuminex AI, this means that we leverage industry-standard sensors (e.g. cameras, LiDAR, NVIDIA GPU systems), particularly those coming out of the autonomous vehicle world that are seeing dramatic increases in scale and therefore dramatic reductions in both price and enhanced performance.

ROI-Infused Innovation is Designed to Provide Scalable Support

ROI-centric innovation is designed from the ground up to be economically supportable at scale. Rolling out new use cases, systems, users or sites should be programmatic and automated. In the modern era, monitoring, patches, and functional updates should be fully remote.

Specific to AI for the airfield, this means that AI models must avoid overfitting. Each application of the model should not require unique training for a specific location, as this would result in scaling the solution to hundreds of unique support instances.

For Illuminex AI it means that our AI-based models such as FOD AI can’t be overtrained to specific runway data. Rather we train with intent on large and diverse data sets to develop solutions that function out-of-the-box on any airfield surface. When we inevitably find an anomaly that evades detection or creates a false positive we update the deployed models at all locations with the enhanced functionality via our remote management interface avoiding the without a requirement to physically access in-vehicle systems.

ROI-Infused Innovation Embodies Future-Proof Design Principles

ROI-centric innovation is “future-proof”. It is designed with an eye to accommodate any probable future state reducing customer risk being locked into a legacy platform. This includes asking: What might this solution look like in 10 years and then evaluate underlying solutions for adaptive design presence to accommodate such a state.

For Illuminex AI this means while meeting SOPs for deployment on existing airfield inspection vehicles we're designing for seamless transition supporting autonomous robots/drones as well as future where every vehicle/aircraft comes standard equipped with factory-embedded sensors/compute that can be leveraged by software-only solution making every aircraft/vehicle traversing airfield an inspection vehicle.

ROI-Centric Innovation Removes Non-Value-Added Barriers to Displacement

Lastly, innovation-centric ROI aims to eliminate non-value-added barriers to competitive displacement (e.g., custom integrations versus open APIs or vendor-owned data). Every project is evaluated to identify and eliminate zero-value competitive moats, ensuring the only competitive advantage lies in continuous innovation that supports ongoing value.

For Illuminex AI this means core value easy customer replace us inferior solution exceptionally difficult competitor outpace our innovation delivery compelling customer value.

By infusing these six hallmarks of innovation-centric ROI into your startup or corporate culture, you can ensure that your projects not only meet but exceed ROI expectations. This approach promotes sustainable growth, enhances operational efficiency, and drives continuous value creation, positioning your startup or initiative as a benchmark for ROI-centric innovation.