3dmindmapping:

The XRF market will almost reach $ 700 million in 2010. At the same time it is characterised by fierce competition. Almost 30 companies compete in this area. Pan Analytical and Thermo Scientific are market leaders. XRF is a very sensitive method for the analysis of the composition of samples. The XRF market is a typical red ocean market (characterised by fierce competition, see Blue Ocean Strategy from W. Chan Kim). I was asked to lead a brainstorm to rethink/redesign the product to head into the blue ocean, a less contested market space. The resulting mindmap (illustrations were added afterwards, click mindmap to enlarge) shows the idea of ‘training’ the XRF using chemometrics (this makes it possible to extract, handle, enrich large data volumes to obtain as much information as possible). Where ‘normal’ XRF is often troublesome, because of the necessary sample pretreatment (grinding, fusion), ‘chemometrically trained’ XRF most of the time does not require sample pretreatment at all. Moreover, it can be used now in any industrial process. Is this a blue ocean strategy? Yes. Not only the product has added value, only a very few people around the world are able to do this. Like the company Nirvention, specialists in using chemometrics to tailor analytical instruments to specific industrial processes. The technique (chemometrically tailoring) can be (and already have been) applied to various other analytical instruments as well, e.g. NIR and Raman.

great blog, makes instruments qualified for many industrial processes.