An Unexpected 30-Year Success

One of the stories I share in my new book, Winning Through Innovation is how a small team of innovators from Hewlett-Packard once convinced company leaders to let them take over a poorly performing product line that was scheduled to be shut down. Known as the “High-Speed Sampling Oscilloscope” product line, company leaders believed the market had moved to a different technology, and this one had no future. The team of innovators thought differently. They redesigned it for a different market, gave it a new name—the "Digital Communications Analyzer" or “DCA”—and took that new market by storm. I am excited to see that 30 years later, not only is this product line still in business (after HP split, it is now part of Keysight), but the latest version of the DCA was just named winner of the “2025 Most Innovative Best Equipment” award at the ECOC Conference in Copenhagen in October. Not bad for a product line company leaders once thought had no future. Congratulations to the current DCA team for this honor!