The history of technology includes projects that defy the laws of physics and the logic of a spreadsheet. Concorde – the White Bird of the supersonic era – is the best example of this. It swallowed billions, in the traditional sense it never paid for itself, and yet it pushed the boundary of what civil aviation considered possible. Concorde and our proprietary digital printing on PET are two different projects, but we were guided by the same decision-making logic – true innovation begins where current profitability ends. 

Concorde, or ambition at Mach 2 

The creators of the project had a simple goal: to shrink the world. A passenger would take off from London in the morning, eat lunch in New York, and be back in time for dinner. Concorde was the promise of an economy in which geographic distance stops being a barrier to business, science, and the exchange of ideas. 

Delivering on that promise required technologies that hadn’t existed before. Engineers from France and the United Kingdom had to build a machine in which every parameter pushed the limits of what was possible at the time: 

• slender delta wings – aerodynamics absent from any passenger aircraft,  

• supercruise capability – flying at Mach 2 without continuous use of afterburners,  

• a fly-by-wire system – the first in commercial passenger aviation,  

• Hiduminium R.R. 58 alloy – aluminum resistant to over 120°C of kinetic heating,  

• fuel transfer between 13 tanks – used as a longitudinal trim system.  

Each of these decisions was an engineering Everest. Together they formed a machine that, from the very first prototype, was economically questionable and charted new paths in aviation technology. 

Engineering hell and market chill – the price of pioneering 

Concorde lost on the spreadsheet almost every single day. Development costs blew past the original budget many times over. Fuel consumption was unprecedented. Every flight was an operation right at the edge of profitability – even with ticket prices several times higher than business class. 

On top of that came factors no schedule had accounted for. The crash of the Tu-144 (the Soviet competitor to Concorde, built for a similar purpose using similar technology) at the 1973 Paris Air Show planted doubts about the safety of supersonic flight. The oil crisis changed the fuel math. Restrictions on sonic booms closed off most overland routes. Airlines that had earlier placed options on Concorde – nearly a hundred options in total, from eighteen carriers – withdrew from their contracts one after another. 

In the end, twenty aircraft were built. Only fourteen ever entered commercial service, a consequence of the fact that pioneering technology rarely fits within the market’s current calculations. 

What Concorde left behind – technologies we still use today 

From an accounting perspective, Concorde was a loss, but from an engineering one it turned out to be the foundation for an entire generation of solutions we now consider standard. The value of this project was never confined to the airlines’ balance sheets. It spread across the whole industry and is still at work today. 

Concorde’s legacy includes: 

• fly-by-wire – the analog control system was roughly fifteen years ahead of solutions in other airliners and became the foundation of the avionics in the Airbus A320 family,  

• carbon brakes – the first in commercial passenger aviation, today standard on every serious airliner,  

• advanced aluminum alloys – processing and certification technology for demanding thermal environments,  

• fuel and trim management systems – solutions that made their way into modern civil and military avionics,  

• European aerospace industry cooperation – an organizational model that became the foundation of the Airbus consortium.  

If, in 1962, someone had counted only the return on investment, the project would never have gotten off the ground, and civil aviation today would be decades behind what it actually is. Short-term profitability can be a muzzle on technology that changes an industry. 

Digital printing on PET – our decision against the spreadsheet 

The same logic applies to our own story. In 2006, we faced a question that economics had a clear answer to: why would we build our own digital printing technology when a ready-made solution could simply be bought? 

The problem was that no ready-made solution existed. There were no machines on the market that could print digitally directly onto standard PET substrate. There were only two options: adapt to the available technologies and accept their limitations – or build something no one else had yet. 

The choice was costly. A single spill of experimental ink onto a print head worth several thousand złoty – real money in 2006 – meant its destruction. On a spreadsheet, every such incident was an “unjustified expense.” In reality, it was part of the price paid for competencies that can’t be bought from a catalog. 

20 years later – competencies that money can’t buy 

The decision made twenty years ago is an asset today. Not as a line on a balance sheet, but as the position we hold in niche, technologically demanding projects. It’s a value that can’t be quickly appraised, nor quickly rebuilt. 

It can be described in three layers: 

• A unique machine park – we work with configurations that exist nowhere else in the world, because no other company has gone through the same development path,  

• A deep understanding of the process – knowledge that isn’t built in a training course, but through two decades of decisions, mistakes, and fixes,  

• A position in pioneering projects – competencies that today allow us to take part in work on printed flexible electronics, where the materials involved are described mainly in scientific publications.  

Each of these elements looks like a detail on its own, but together they create an advantage competitors can’t reproduce simply by buying equipment. The equipment itself isn’t the real value – the path that led to it is. 

Qwerty and the courage for projects that don’t fit on a spreadsheet 

Innovation is born from the decision to do something that can’t immediately be justified by return on investment. Concorde would never have had the right to take off if someone had counted only ticket sales. Digital printing on PET would never have had the right to exist if someone had counted only the destroyed print heads. 

If courage fails, the consequences are only measurable years later. Competitors are left with off-the-shelf solutions they can’t surpass. The customer gets only what the market already offers. The industry stands still, because no one pushed the boundary. 

At Qwerty, we treat innovation as part of our company culture, not as a single financial decision. Every złoty spent on “unprofitable” research comes back in the form of competencies that can’t be bought and advantages that can’t be copied. It isn’t a matter of risk. It’s a matter of knowing where you’re headed – and staying consistent in that pursuit. 

Concorde never made money in the classic sense, but it changed aviation. It shows that the best technologies don’t fit on a spreadsheet, but in the decisions of people who can see further than a single quarter.