Here’s the first piece of a 2 part blog on innovation. This week is about what innovation is, what it isn’t, how to look after good ideas, and why you should be pushing your agencies and internal guys.
There are real paradigm shifts in the way digital impacts your business planning, and not just the way it is changing your communication planning – this is an area of length discussion on its own.
Whole sectors are being disrupted as digital provides a platform to do business differently.
This sort of disruption has historically taken decades, giving brands time to re-align (or at least decide to ignore it), but is now happening in a matter of a year or two. And once that momentum has shifted, it’s often difficult, and definitely expensive to regain lost ground.
Innovation doesn’t have to come from reconfiguration
It’s also not about pulling your products apart, or reinventing, as this is problematic at best and damaging at worst.
Unless, of course, your business has an appetite for innovation.
You should be striving to be innovative across a series of areas, including product, but also with digital partnerships, idea generation, channels, messages…
Innovation doesn’t have to come from invention. It can also come from reconfiguration.
It absolutely does come though, from insight, and testing.
And your business needs a way of finding insight in the way your consumers behave and innovating a response.
The digital space is sympathetic to innovation, as it lets you test quickly, learn from it, and move forward.
Yet it’s not sympathetic to those who don’t innovate in some form.
Innovation – thinking and acting
Any innovation program needs to add value to a product or the consumer.
For example, think about how you can create a single experience per user.
This is the path to real, productive innovation.
The key drivers of the value would include:
- Personalized experiences – think individualized experiences
- Co-creation process – think the user has a say in the outcome
- Delivery networks – different modes of delivery
- Communities – for further innovation
- Individuals – individuals rather than mass
It’s worth noting that the next big digital innovation isn’t going to come from a brand, but rather from a pimply faced uni student sitting in a garage out at Bankstown – or from Google…
So this isn’t about technical innovation but using what’s around to your advantage.
Innovation – It’s about the ideas
The importance of new ideas in your business, and the way ideas are generated really needs attention.
How is it that you generate and germinate ideas within your business?
Are ideas encouraged, or are they encouraged and dismissed?
Don’t ask consumers what they want
Once you’ve found an insight what would you do with it?
You should absolutely be pushing your digital agencies, and your own teams, to think differently and behave creatively.
And innovation isn’t about finding the silver bullet, as that can be inherently risky if it’s outside of your core business.
It is about using digital tools and channels to stay ahead.
Next week I’ll discuss a few examples of how complacency has completely disrupted som major categories, and a few new businesses that are well on their way to doing this.
