We utilize a lot of companies to build innovation procedures and culture, ideally leading to the development of what an advancement is named by us competency. Looking to get a more substantial, complacent firm to embrace the chance and uncertainty of innovation is challenging. There are often many preconceived notions in what the firm and its own people should do, where they need to spend their time, what’s “important” and what isn’t.
But the truth is with the right coaching and a good group of tools and methods you can get over a great deal of learned avoidance, and create the right ideas actually. Good ideas, that is, until the main point where someone asks the question: Is this just what a firm in (complete the blank) industry must do? What we have here is a predicate question – requesting set up company should solve the problem, often before or rather than understanding if the customer has a need, and whether or not that require should be stuffed.
Whether or not just a firm in a particular industry or market segment “should” solve the problem is next to the point. Either it’ll or it will not. If it decides that the answer or offering is outside it’s features, well and good. If the need is pressing and customers are prepared to solve it, someone or some other company will solve the problem. Where this thinking matters is when an innovation team starts every discussion with: is this what our firm or industry must do? Often there are preconceived Too, and very powerful notions, in what a business should, or shouldn’t do.
These notions claim that once a business model or industry concentrate or customer portion strategy is developed and perfected, all future opportunities should be looked at from this zoom lens. Nothing, my friend, can be further from the reality. He found that the answer was yes. He didn’t permit the reality that Apple was a PC company to keep it from determining and solving vital and interesting customer needs.
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Now, there’s a fine line here between determining and resolving “adjacent” needs or extending capabilities or business models to clients, and getting into new lines of business. Richard Branson is just about the only person I’ve heard about who succcessfully enters new lines of business. He is innovating marketing and customer experience, rather than products and business models, so his model might be a little easier to replicate. But to Jobs back.
There are two other things that produce this story compelling. First is the fact that one of is own first acts upon returning to Apple was to cut about 80% of the merchandise collection. He simplified the merchandise suite to focus more attention on fewer products. So in some respect he compressed and consolidated the area he thought Apple should be in. But then he looked for opportunities to use Apple’s design capabilities, its customer experience, its ability to integrate and bring disparate items to solve lots of problems together, from the iPod to the iPhone and the iPad.
Apple wasn’t at first a telephone company, or a Music player company and many of its initial attempts to enter consumer electronics was not successful (see the Newton). But he didn’t allow the business to simply reject good ideas that solved customer needs which were outside of its ethnic purview. The other thing that Jobs didn’t do is concentrate Apple on things it obviously couldn’t and shouldn’t do, however. He grasped the proximity of gadgets, cellular tablets and phones, and the length between Apple and other factors like toaster ovens. But one last thing you’ll notice is that every innovation opened the entranceway to another adjacent space.
For example dominance in handsets now means that Apple is relevant in obligations and has released possibly the most secure payments mechanism for individuals. Would Apple be relevant in payments as a PC company? Probably not, but it is relevant as a payments provider with a prominent marketshare in the handheld space.
On the other hand, nearly every corporate and business invention team I use rejects a lot of development opportunities out of hand. It’s not inside our business model, they’ll say, or a “blank” company doesn’t do this, or wouldn’t be accepted if it did “X”. So they leave behind the most urgent needs customers specify to pursue ideas that both they and their customers have less investment in. Can your leopard change its spots? Can your teams identify and continue to contemplate opportunities outside your defined business model or sweet place without complete cognitive dissonance?
Re-train at intervals because skills can only be improved by repetition. Take a look at karate, golf, soccer and other sports you have to keep practising to progress. It is the same with work training. For instance people learn everything on a time management course but maybe only apply 10% of what they learnt and forget the rest.