3. Designing for Scalability
Innovation is characterized by new functionality added to systems. The means for innovation in all industries is by adding software to the application on existing or new hardware. Often additional functionality exists in an isolated system and can be integrated as separate workload to your application. As an example, think about motion control added to a system that only provided PLC functionality so far.
Sometimes the software for additional functionality can be integrated into existing hardware, sometimes additional functionality requires additional computers with respective software and these new computers need to be integrated into the application system. Thus, scalability is mandatory for innovation.