Many companies, especially large ones, have difficulty innovating.
Is this a surprise? It shouldn’t be.
In my experience, the left and right hands of most enterprises have never met.
There isn’t even a universal definition of innovation, let alone what it entails.
Putative experts have written volumes of scholarly and not-so-scholarly books and articles on this subject — some so complicated they muddy the waters.
In addition, there’s an obsession today in many precincts to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. Who likes disruption? Other than venture capitalists, nobody. Customers hate it. Divorce is disruption. Rioting is disruption. Disruption is painful.
In general, people like and will embrace gradual change. Gradual change is manageable. The key to successful innovation is diligently maintaining a steady rate of incremental change.
Disruption, however, is the bane of innovation: it focuses on output, one-upmanship, and industry dynamics — and not on customers.
Background
Innovate is derived from the Latin innovare: to make new. That said, making something new isn’t necessarily an innovation.
Let me repeat that: Making something new isn’t necessarily an innovation.
Unless the “innovator” has improved the lives of customers, according to those customers, the new offering is not an innovation. Without a formalized means of assessing customer satisfaction (excluding bogus social media), innovation is impossible.
NOTE: This axiom applies, regardless of company size, to every industry and every customer category: military, industrial, scientific, commercial, financial, consumer, etc. Violate it at your peril.
The Dilbert strip below illustrates this point perfectly.
Take the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service. Many in Corporate America blindly and blithely accept AI as an innovation — because it’s in vogue and allegedly saves money by shortening process time and replacing humans.
But, when the impersonal, enervating, alienating experience induces the customer to yell at store clerks and telephone techs, waste his time, despise the supplier, and abruptly hang up the phone (read “Best Buy? You Cannot Be Sirius!”) on clueless idiots, AI is not an innovation.
Amazon.com’s Alexa is a well-known consumer-based example of AI, a supposed innovation for the masses. By issuing voice commands, Alexa’s owners query the temperature, request music selections, set reminder alarms, and switch on and off their appliances.
Is Alexa improving their lives?
Despite becoming lazy, addicted slaves to Alexa, the majority of owners likely would answer in the affirmative — even though Amazon remotely records (spies on) their conversations, sex, you name it. Oddly, upon learning about the spying, most owners express temporary shock, shrug off their dismay, and continue their habitual enslavement.
Count me out: Alexa will not improve my life; I’ll never own one.
The Branding-Innovation Cycle
When innovating, the fundamental question becomes: What new/tweaked offering should we produce, for whom, and why?
Your brand — the emotional connection customers have with your company, that which provides your company purpose and direction — answers this question. I explain this in more detail in Brand Is Destiny: The Ultimate Bottom Line.
Without knowing what your customers want and need, and how they feel about your company — and lacking the concomitant purpose and direction that a strong brand confers — you can neither hatch nor improve an offering (product or service) with success.
Moreover, even if you have crafted a strong brand, innovation demands execution.
The inability to marshal and coordinate the requisite internal and external resources — from marketing to sales to finance to engineering to manufacturing — will stymie, and possibly nullify, your innovative efforts.
Furthermore, if your product or service is a unique standout, it may be beneficial to patent and/or trademark it. Tread carefully here, because not all products are worthy of patenting or trademarking.
Finally, you must be able to verify that your company’s innovation is, in fact, an innovation: it improves the personal or business lives of your customers, according to them.
These steps are depicted below in a five-step, continuous branding-innovation cycle.
Parting Advice to CEOs
Innovation is a neverending process, dependent on a strong brand for clear purpose and direction. Without a clear purpose and direction, understood and endorsed by all employees at all levels, what and how and why are you innovating?
Building a strong brand means knowing and revering customers — and communicating to them in their language.
Never assume that, to innovate, your company must crank out a new product or an iteration of an existing product. That may or may not be true. Sometimes, all that’s necessary is a small tactical improvement to customer responsiveness, involving no technology.
If disruption is your obsession, stop. Customers and innovation hate disruption.
Successful innovation always drops to the bottom line.
POSTSCRIPT #1: Ivanka Trump Says Innovation Is Key to Job Creation (09.23.19)
© 2019 Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Marc Rudov is a branding advisor to CEOs,
producer of MarcRudovTV, and author of four books