Technology & Innovation aren’t synonyms
What may be a great innovation could still end up being perceived like a lab rat that is a mantlepiece of experimentation in a desperate attempt to find suitable business outcomes to retrofit it into!
It is abundantly clear that Technology & Innovation aren’t synonyms!
The misconception that innovation is synonymous to technology has been around for many years now and still prevails in some contingents when in reality (which has been proven time and again) one could have great innovations that is miles ahead the current state of the market without all that many people adopting it into their lives.
You don’t want to be that Einstein whose innovation nobody wants!
Let’s face facts. An Einstein level invention that doesn’t fit well with the current scheme of things or is astronomically priced even just supposing it fits in, may certainly end up with a poorer rate of adoption amongst the user community.
So sadly, what may be a great innovation could still end up being perceived like a lab rat that is a mantlepiece of experimentation in a desperate attempt to find suitable business outcomes to retrofit it into!
Take Microsoft Zune for example.
How many of you have heard of this product as opposed to the iPod?
When this was an example of a good product in all senses, the only folly that one could put a finger on perhaps is the strategy that tried to seize market share from an already existing mature product in the same segment thus limiting the probability of winning big / even a remote possibility of a win.
Technology is just the veneer, the polish on surface of the wood so to speak.
With the larger part of the application / business not thought through well enough and without employing inventive & breakthrough technology driven to solve real-world problems there is certainly a big hollow in there to fill that may prove to be a very costly mistake.
Is Innovation your cup of tea?
So, when innovation may be so crucial for every organisation, there still are very few of them who get into that framework of inventing stuff, or even sanction funds to employ a research wing.
Why is it so?
Over other reasons typical to their own, they broadly boil down to:
COSTS
ALIGNMENT
Costs
There are many costs surrounding everything that goes under the banner of innovation within the confines of an organisation and those may not be limited only to a one-time investment / expenditure.
Also, breakthrough innovations don’t come out on a daily basis - at EOD. That’s not the way the world works. So, organisations funding research activities may mostly mean spending without having an expectation / deadline over the outcomes.
Talk to people who have had a stint in hardcore research and they’ll tell you how much of an effort, time, stress / sleepless nights it took them to get to a stage of applicable, usable, viable, feasible, commendable, widely acceptable part of what can be termed an invention.
Alignment
Organisations generally have to draft what is called a Memorandum of Understanding – MoU, a purpose defined around their existence, their core business area, a scope they plan operate within the confines of. Whatever falls outside the purview of that scope is probably a secondary / tertiary area and may end up getting prioritised lower down the table or may lead to a decision to “Buy / Hire” over “Build”.
It is for these very reasons that “Outsourcing” was born.
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the manner in which intensive processes that aren’t native and central to one organisation are delegated to another external solution partner / organisation who would then own & manage those processes towards meeting the required performance metrics as approved by the outsourcer and as agreed upon between the two entities.
Think of an automotive organisation that manufactures vehicles.
They would need to tie up with many suppliers over various parts small & big. These may be the key resources / key attributes that are absolutely essential to run the business but it doesn’t mean the organisation can overpower itself and take the decision of manufacturing those components in-house and from scratch. Alternately the market already has a handful of people (OEMs) manufacturing those components perfectly over the years with all quality standards & processes in place.
That rationale is what often leads to a decision of Buy over Build leading to key partnerships & tie-ups getting established.
Whereabouts of Innovation
When innovation rooted in technology may be successful in getting a few eyeballs initially, there is a great chance that it might still end up going flat on the market if its applications / use cases are near zero / perhaps so limited that it fails to target enough problems and solve for at least one of them that is relevant in the current scheme of things - which in essence is Market Fit / Fitment.
What’s a Market Fit?
Finding a market fitment needs innovation in multiple areas other than what may just be purely technology. Some things worthy of a mention here could be:
identifying & mapping the problem to solution space
process used during the build phase
finding ways to curate market pitches in building awareness
the approach taken to acquisitions & conversions
the strategy that enables retention of the acquired user base
in envisioning scale-up plans by identifying various pivots (a product fitting into other segments but requiring a bit of an alignment / additional features)
the definition of a protocol for customer-fronted teams to address queries from the field & support them by owning their problems, wholly
in planning & building a backlog that is rich with relevant features that aims to add value continuously to the users, keep them hooked intern building long-term customer loyalty
These points are by far covered by the innovation radar.
What innovation does the organisation offer?
Who are the users who’d find this innovation useful & be willing to pay / use it?
How would the organisation define its process around offering this innovation?
Where would the innovation be available - access-points / distribution channels?
An effective Innovation strategy quite rightly should be deep-rooted in going beyond technology & play its part in aligning all departments / teams putting them on the right path to growth.
For ex: Do you remember the days where you’d have to write code adhered to one platform because your client was already tied to that platform / OS and there is a comfort factor that crept in leading to a resistance / sense of reluctance over any changes in that?
Many years later – today, it is thanks to Opensource, virtualisation & cloud you could get online and choose your OS, platform, software, libraries get them all installed sans partitions setting them all up, ready for use within a jiffy requiring a few minor clicks / commits over a multi-step modal wizard (settings). You could directly start off coding / development writing your business logic within minutes post setup.
And talking of code, there is a whole boilerplate that’s available so that you don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of defining the basics of linking up all interfaces, services, APIs, communication channels, backend & frontend.
In the 90s there were C-libraries and there was a boilerplate & framework made available in VC++, MFC as well. But, to get to the level of:
effectively combining all these ideas
making it available over the cloud
making it truly platform independent
went a full circle with deep-rooted innovation solving for a multitude problems & offering a seamless UX which is the primary aim of organisations who swear by the phrase Product Led Growth (PLG).
What’s Product Led Growth
While on the subject of overall innovation by effectively using the product as a whole and building a strategy around it in driving adoption and retention while still fore-fronting it essentially with technology there has to be a special mention for organisations that practice Product led growth.
Product Led Growth (PLG) is an end-user focused growth strategy that is centred around the product - making it a primary driver whilst all other organisational functions / teams right from Design, Engineering, Marketing, Sales & Support actively play their vital roles around the product in offering a seamless user experience (UX) whilst looking for continuous feedback from the market factoring it in to better the product offering incrementally.
Whilst embracing the rampant disruption many start-ups especially in the technology space have embedded the product led growth as a principle deep into their culture and the way they build their products.
Now, what’s the chief value in putting the product at the helm in an organisation one may ask?
We have transitioned from on-prem software to the cloud & open-source technologies today with pricing models making it dirt cheap to own, use and build products as opposed to what it used to be in the 1990s when owning something like a desktop PC with proprietary software & libraries was a real big deal.
Take an example of B2C Lending products / Loans for instance.
I’d save you the trouble and myself some grace by not asking you to get to your phone and count the number of calls you get regarding personal loans / overdrafts on a regular weekly / monthly cohort.
That’s a sales-centric model which sadly is prevalent even today where a product is envisioned & curated by a certain department in the organisation based on considerations best known to them and sales teams are trained, given hardcore targets to get to the field & sell (mostly a hard sell).
The reason this whole model itself perhaps feels archaic and out of place in today’s parlance is because the world has pivoted onto something better today in putting most of the onus on the product and its offering / capability itself as tied to the market’s needs which is an instant connect & a feel good factor for the users.
So, given today’s timeline, anything that may not quite be aligned over a strategy that’s necessarily centred around the product & user’s feedback:
may lead to an acute lack of interest
may be tough for marketing to curate pitches
may be largely unacceptable in the market
may be quite a task for sales to land a breakthrough
“Changing times, changing measures”
No more is innovation synonymous to technology today.
Innovation is much more than just tech. It is the way organisations reinvent their functioning and yearn to offer the best experiences to their users whilst keeping their overall costs at bay and letting their leading growth indicators take-off and shoot through the roof.
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