Apparently the entrepreneurial and innovation life is a "journey". This is the mot du jour to describe a series of business decision, some of which are planned....others less so. It's a fine word, it's just that it rather mis-describes our reality. A journey implies a starting point and an end point with some kind of planned route in between. This hasn't been our experience, nor I suspect for many other inventors.
The photo above is one of the very first projects that we deployed a walk on netting system offshore. I am guessing that it was 1998. The last millennium anyway. There were earlier systems, notably a netting system Gordon rigged up in the early 90's offshore in Norway. But that was so long ago we don't have photos of it!
Little did we know when we developed the above netting system that this was the first step on a "journey" towards developing innovative suspended work platforms, culminating in the V-Deck.
The process has been more an exploration than a journey. It all started with the problem - expensive and time consuming access to the under deck of structures. And as we explored the problem deeper, new answers eventually presented themselves. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but I hope you get my drift.
In answer to my own question "where did it all start"? It all started with the global and highly expensive problem of under deck access which we believed there were better answers to. There is no one answer to this problem but we like to think that we have developed a really cost and time effective answer that fits a huge part of the problem.
(I would like to credit the photo to Keith Lawrie who has been an important part of the exploration. as an intrepid caver Keith knows quite a bit about exploration!)