Innovation Under Pressure: why speed to market is still so hard
As expert in secure, smart & connected devices Vention has conducted a benchmark survey to better understand what the key challenges in innovation are. One of these is Time to market.
Innovation is always a balancing act between budget, time, quality, and risk. In practice, organisations constantly make trade-offs between these factors while trying tos tay competitive in a fast-moving market.
One of the central questions in our research was whether companies are primarily driven by the pressure to bring products to market quickly or whether quality, budget and risk still dominate decision-making. Cybersecurity is no longer a side topic in innovation. It has become a core design driver.
The results show a clear pattern: speed to market remains one of the strongest drivers in innovation. At the same time, many organisations struggle with the very conditions needed to achieve it.
The pressure to move faster
A strong need to shorten development cycles clearly emerged from the research. When respondents were asked, “What would you change tomorrow in your innovation process?”, the most common answer was a shorter time to market, mentioned by 26% of respondents.
This highlights an important reality: organisations know that being late to market can mean losing momentum, losing relevance, or losing opportunities altogether. But despite this urgency, several structural obstacles continue to slow innovation down.
What is holding organisations back?
One of the expected barriers is the shortage of skilled employees. Talent constraints continue to affect the ability to develop and deliver products efficiently.
But the research also points to another major factor: the volatility of market demand. In fact, this was identified as the most important external factor influencing time to market. When customer needs keep shifting, it becomes much harder to make stable development choices and maintain project focus. One of the expected barriers is the shortage of skilled employees. Talent constraints continue to affect the ability to develop and deliver products efficiently.
“What would you change tomorrow in your innovation process?”
In addition, respondents often mentioned the limits of internal knowledge and capabilities. Keeping knowledge up to date has become increasingly difficult as products and technologies grow more complex. Products are no longer isolated systems. More often, they are part of a broader ecosystem that includes apps, cloud platforms, data infrastructure, and integrations with other systems. But the research also points to another major factor: the volatility of market demand. In fact, this was identified as the most important external factor influencing time to market.
When customer needs keep shifting, it becomes much harder to make stable development choices and maintain project focus. One of the expected barriers is the shortage of skilled employees. Talent constraints continue to affect the ability to develop and deliver products efficiently.
That growing system complexity creates new challenges. It is therefore no surprise that integration issues were named as the second biggest challenge in innovation projects. The more connected and interdependent products become, the more difficult it is to control complexity and maintain development speed.
Internal process weaknesses play a major role
Alongside these external pressures, the research also highlights several internalweaknesses that slow organizations down.Oneof these is the challenge of scaling from development to production.
Many organisations struggle to scale innovation from development to production. Key challenges include a lack of disciplined, phased frameworks (only 17% use them) and insufficient standardization (70% report it is too limited). Furthermore, only 30% leverage modular development, forcing most companies to inefficiently reinvent solutions from scratch instead of reusing modules.
"Only 17% of respondents say they work with a structured phased process"
Building the right foundation
The research makes one thing very clear: organisations feel strong pressure to accelerate innovation, but many are still constrained by both external uncertainty and internal process limitations.
Market demand is moving fast, technologies are becoming more complex, and integration challenges are increasing. At the same time, many companies still lack the phased processes, standardization, modularity, and reuse needed to manage that complexity effectively. As a result, innovation is not only about moving faster. It is about building the right foundation to move faster in a controlled and repeatable way.
Organisations that succeed will likely be the ones that:
- focus on their core technology
- use partners strategically
- invest in modular architectures
- validate early and bring more structure and standardization into the innovation process.
Because in the end, speed to market is not just a matter of working harder. It is a matter of working smarter.
Want to know more about cybersecurity and innovation? Download our whitepaper here.
How to bring smart devices to market faster with predictable results.
Who's it for
- For leadership teams
- For product and R&D teams
- For operations and service teams
Send directly to your email
