Roots of Automation Innovation

Many automation companies were founded upon innovative developments for niche applications. Successful start-ups expanded their products and markets beyond initially narrow applications and geographies, depending on the real value of the innovation, and also whether or not the founder was able to hire suitable leaders to grow the company beyond the initial entrepreneurial stages.

Since automation is such a fragmented business, all of the major companies have a conglomeration of products, each with relatively small volume, but lumped together to form sizeable businesses. But the few larger companies rarely come up with follow-through developments that match the original founder’s innovations. This relates to Clayton Christiansen’s point in his book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” that innovation cannot easily be “managed.”

Major segments

An exception to the start-up-innovation rule was the distributed control system (DCS), a mix of several important innovations developed in the early 1970s by a team of engineers within Honeywell. This generated a new category that achieved $100 million annual revenues within just a couple of years, and the segment has since expanded to several billions of dollars worldwide.

其他主要的自动化分部，也是在20世纪70年代实现重要性的，是可编程逻辑控制器（PLC）。这种突破性的创新是多产发明家迪克莫利的大脑，而他的第一个PLC是史密森尼展出的。他为与Modicon相关的小型开发公司（现在是施耐德的一部分）工作。此外，这一创新也是艾伦布拉德利的ODO Struger，现在是罗克韦尔自动化，利用这一创新成为美国PLC市场领导者。

第一个PLC是为特定应用程序的用于特定应用 - 可重算的汽车制造业务的测试装置，更换硬连线继电器逻辑，这很难修改。但随着PLC适合涵盖无数申请，这一创新导致了一个在全球范围内成长为数十亿美元的市场部门。

Another major industrial automation segment is termed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA). This loose conglomeration of products was fragmented among several markets and applications until networked personal computers (PCs) and Windows-based HMI, or human-machine interface, software arrived in the late ’80s and ’90s. Several innovative start-ups grew fairly rapidly, offering HMI software with connections to remote PLCs and industrial input/output devices (I/O).

值得注意的是，较大的自动化供应商在新的PC软件中没有领先;所有大幅增长都来自创新初创企业。Wonderware是由动态工程师丹尼斯·莫林开始的，被智力上升，由前福克斯伯勒工程师史蒂夫鲁宾开始。

让我们来到传感器和执行器。罗斯蒙特始于特殊的温度传感器，RTDS，或电阻温度探测器,但增长中dly with the development of its innovative capacitive differential pressure sensors, which rapidly overtook the traditional instrumentation leaders. Rosemount gained market leadership and was eventually acquired by Emerson—which also acquired other innovative sensor companies, among them Brooks (flow), Beckman (pH) and several others.

Fisher控件由Bill Fisher在爱荷华州开始，制作创新阀门和执行器。它是由蒙斯纳的收购，后来由艾默生。有趣的是，罗斯蒙特和费舍尔都试图通过分支到DCS来增长，但他们的产品相对微不足道，直到艾默生与PC和软件（Intellution等成分）一起生成与Deltav的领导力。