Strategic innovation
by
Charlie Bess
One of the comments I've heard quite a bit lately is "Think globally, innovate locally." It would appear that this perspective means that for some companies, innovation is everyone's role. There are examples of companies like Google that appear to have this kind of an innovation philosophy integrated into their culture. For organizations in the product space, I can see how this intellectual churn is advantageous, although you may need to have special business-based harversters who can pull out the good thoughts and allow the engineers to get back to their day job (and continue being innovative).
It does make me wonder how innovation everywhere works within organizations that do consulting or other activites where every hour is tracked (and ideally billed). Are individuals in that space destined to a lifetime of burnout or flash-in-the-pan brilliance? Keeping up with advancements takes time. This is another argument for more business- rather than effort-based measures.
Do organizations that have a long term relationship with their clients have the time to innovate locally? Or is it just a fact that change is accelerating so quickly that time to market and ROI override any other concerns in the need to remain competitive.
Consumers are often not able to understand and describe opportunities and will benchmark perceived needs against what is already in use. There are many examples of new products and services coming on the market where there was no identified need. The Newton PDA and the Ipod are just a couple of examples from Apple alone.
An innovative company must look beyond today’s consumers in the development of products or services. It is less a question of what consumers need but more of where the opportunities will be. This shows the importance of understanding the Forces of Change impacting on the market regardless of where those forces come from.
