Concentrate on the needs of your customers and the challenges in the market. Innovations will only prevail if they create added value for your customers. Put yourself in their shoes and find out what your customers really want and what they would spend their money on.

Innovation doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time for new ideas to take root. And it may take many years to introduce a new culture that makes innovation one of its central components.

Being innovative means acting differently to the competition. It means bringing new products, services or business models to the market. To get to new ideas, you first need to let go of existing patterns and structures and let fresh air in. The motto is: think different!

The aim of the innovation process should also encompass the creation of new product or service ideas with a high level of business benefit,
using new technologies or replacing the existing business model with a disruptive approach. Innovation means systematically creating ideas, selecting the value-creating solutions from among these and then implementing them as quickly as possible.

The digital transformation is rapidly accelerating the speed of innovation. Technological progress and social change are resulting in new products and services that better serve to satisfy the needs of consumers and which form the basis for new business models. At the same time, the possibilities of more intense collaboration have dramatically improved as a result of modern communication technologies.

Conventional understanding of the economy is based on a linear model; natural resources are extracted and processed into products. The consumer buys these and uses them. When they are worn out or are no longer needed the consumer disposes of the products. This model fails to recognise the high economic, environmental and social costs associated with the extraction, processing and disposal of raw materials and is therefore seen as unsustainable in the long term.

The 2022 edition of the European Congress of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, also known as EuroMedLab, was held this April in Munich (Germany), after being rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of delegates and visitors attended the congress, which took place from April 10^th to April 14^th at the International Congress Center of Munich.

Augmented reality is one of the big buzzwords that are decisively shaping Industry 4.0. In the IoT, the Internet of Things, machine and machine as well as man and machine are increasingly merging with each other. It is inevitable that this will also change people’s perception and thus their reality.