Ask someone in to fix a lamp at home and it lighting up on the spot is not the same as it still lighting up six months later. A demo is about that one moment; daily use is about every day being like that. Building a thing once and using it for a year call on two quite different sets of skills. Carried into a factory, that distinction gets written into a rather exacting scorecard.
A scorecard is nothing strange to ordinary people either. From a few columns in a household ledger to a handful of boxes filled in at year-end, the point is to turn a feeling that is hard to pin down into cells that can be lined up. Once the cells exist, looking good falls to second place; whether they are filled, and filled steadily, becomes what everybody can talk about.
According to media reports, Qiao Tianjie, chief executive of Linjiedian, laid out this distinction at an industry sub-forum as two stages: one answers whether a thing can be built, the other whether it can be used. This article writes only of that judgment and the path he has taken, and brings over no operating figures from the production line.
A Demo Versus Daily Use
Building it is about whether that one moment is handsome enough. Put a prototype on a stage, let the movements be crisp and the picture clear, and onlookers remember it easily. But a factory does not score a single attempt; it counts in shifts: the same sequence today, tomorrow, and again with a new batch of materials, without stopping every other day for someone to adjust it.
The difference between a demo and daily use shows up at home too. Cooking a dish successfully once from a video is not the same as still being able to cook it when rushing home from work every day; change the heat, the pan, the batch of ingredients, and the feel in the hands has to shift with it. A factory writes that feel into clauses and has no room for performing according to mood.
According to media reports, he called the earlier stage the development state and the later one the deployment state, and said the two should be measured with different rulers. The split is not mysterious: one is making something for people to look at, the other is putting it into a real rhythm for people to use. Leave the ruler unchanged and a handsome demo is easily taken for a usable product.
A Scorecard
According to media reports, at the forum he set out four hard metrics for the deployment state: takt, success rate, stability and return on investment. None of the four is fancy, but each watches one vital point, and together they are exactly the questions asked on a workshop floor every day.
Takt asks about speed, how long one cycle takes and whether it keeps up with the line. Success rate asks about right and wrong, how many of a hundred attempts actually work. Stability asks whether it can stay that way, rather than being accurate for three days and drifting on the fourth. Return on investment asks whether the arithmetic works, whether the labor saved and the delays avoided earn back what was put in.
The four also pull on one another. Push only on takt and the success rate tends to drop first; make the success rate look good alone and it may come from picking easy jobs and going slowly. To truly enter a factory all four have to clear the line together, and no single one standing out can carry a whole shift. That is likely why he wrote them side by side on one sheet.
The easiest of the four to overlook is the last. However clever a piece of equipment is, if commissioning, upkeep and downtime add up to more than it saves, the books will not balance. According to media reports, he described the four as a threshold for turning a technology product into an industrial one; this article adds no adjective to that threshold and keeps only the fact that it is a ruler.
Nine Months on Its Own
First, where this person stands. According to media reports, Qiao Tianjie is the chief executive of Linjiedian; the company was split off from Zhiyuan and has been independent for about nine months. The discussion took place at the dexterous-manipulation sub-forum of the 2026 Zhiyuan Innovation Day, on the afternoon of October 29, and was covered by several outlets.
That background of a split and independence is worth one line. While attached to a maker of whole machines, whether a component was well made was mostly judged by how smoothly the maker's own machines used it; once independent, it has to face other firms' conditions, other firms' acceptance tests and other firms' payback periods directly. A scorecard turning from an internal standard into something delivered outward carries a different weight.
Nine months is not long, yet it is enough to move a company from taking a prototype on the road to having to calculate payback with customers. According to media reports, he described the important task of this stage as giving the industry a new set of evaluation criteria. This article gives that background only to show the position from which the scorecard was handed over, and does not estimate the company's prospects.
The Radar He Once Worked On
According to media reports, he worked on lidar early on and saw a class of components go from very expensive to affordable. That experience is often used as an analogy for dexterous hands, but he himself does not approve of applying it directly. The reason is practical: whether a component can fall sharply in price depends first on how large a share it holds in the cost of the whole machine.
A high share can be spread thin once volume rises; with a low share, no amount of volume saves much. According to media reports, he treated that share as the precondition for deciding whether the analogy holds. This article gives neither the specific prices he once handled nor any figure to prop up the judgment; it keeps only the idea of looking at the share.
In other words, one falling price curve cannot simply be copied just because two parts are both called components. What lidar accounts for in a car and what a dexterous hand accounts for in a robot are two separate sums. Work out the sums first, then talk about whether the old road can be followed; that reluctance to reach for an easy analogy is itself part of the background.
Not Reusing Old Experience
Not reusing it does not mean disbelieving in scale. According to media reports, he proposed that volume production has to reach a certain step before commercial use can be discussed: without enough volume, the supply chain cannot steady itself, yield cannot converge, and cost cannot be pushed down into a range a customer will pay. It is a question of order, not a slogan.
The word order is worth reading slowly. First comes steady delivery, only then can yield converge; once yield converges, a quoted price might come down; once a customer will pay, a line can be scheduled into a shift. Skip a step and if any link fails to keep up, the good looks of the earlier one never land.
By the same logic, he kept his wording measured. Which level of volume counts as enough, and where prices go later, are given in public information as directions rather than fixed numbers, so this article writes only the direction. Where a person is willing to draw the boundary is often more worth recording than anything he shouted.
The Part That Was Cut
Several kinds of content are left out entirely. Figures such as the number of steps on the line, the time of a single cycle and the length of continuous operation belong to another article, and not one number from them is repeated here; his remarks on rival firms releasing products, which involve judging other companies, are not retold either.
That division of labor is not a way of dodging numbers. The same set of production-line data serves another article to show how steps link and whether a demo survives disturbance; this one cares only about the ruler a person uses to measure them. Mix the two and the ruler gets buried under detail.
No label about age or net worth is attached to him either, no unverified detail is added to his background, and no rootless inner thoughts or scene-setting is written. Only two things remain: the judgments he stated in public and the background the media recorded. Set those two out clearly and the scorecard stands more firmly than any string of lively figures.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information and is for reference only. It does not constitute investment advice.