Innovate or Die
Article by - Pradip
Sinha,
Associate Consultant,
ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources.
Abstract
Today, success has become an impermanent achievement
which can be taken away by competitors any time. It has rather become a
fundamental requisite for companies to continuously innovate and evolve
according to the ever-changing moods of the customers for their survival and
growth. If they fail, unfortunately, there will be no tomorrow for them.
We know that the bigger and better we
get, the higher the hurdles become. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to
challenge and continuously improve the way we run our business.
-Bernie Marcus
Why Innovation?
Today, business is nothing less than war and victory is
ephemeral. Sustaining a position in the consumers' mind is an on-going battle
and victory can be snatched away with the blink of an eye. The continuous battle
for the top spot has forced companies to constantly innovate. Very few companies
are successful in sustaining their dominant position and those that are,
continuously innovate. They have the courage to attack their position in the
market. Continuous innovation and self-attack are at the core of competitive
strategy for the 21st century companies. Jack Trout and Al Ries (Trout and Ries)
in their book Marketing Warfare say that the best way to improve a company's
position is to constantly attack it. They feel that a company can keep
strengthening its position by introducing new products. To put it more
precisely, a moving target is hard to hit than a static one.
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Innovation, for the new breed of companies, is all about
changing the environment. It is about breaking the old rules and routinized work
pattern and introducing new things with new standards. It means creating a sea
change in the way a consumer performs his day-to-day activities. According to
professor Gurprit S Kindra, School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada,
"the ATM was an innovation which totally changed the way people used to deal
with their money".
Most marketing experts agree that a company needs to continuously innovate and
attack itself to be a consistent performer. According to Paul Greenberg
(Greenberg), President of the 56 Group, LLC and the author of CRM at the Speed
of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century, companies need a
proactive (self-attack) effort to succeed in today's business world. Professor
Theodore Lewitt of Harvard Business School in an article in the Harvard Business
Review nearly fifty years ago, argued that, to survive, companies must
constantly look for new ways to satisfy customers' needs. Just imagine how true
it is in today's context.
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2005, ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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