Innovate Yourself First And Your Product Second
Posted on February 16, 2008
How has Google, in the space of one decade, gone from being merely a company name, to a dictionary included verb used in everyday conversation that describes an on line generic search for information,
It isn’t because of their search engine.
It isn’t because they offer free email.
It isn’t because they provide free cloud computing software (software that is distributed and used on line) such as word-processing, presentation or spreadsheet programs.
And it isn’t because of the hundreds of other services and products and solutions they provide.
These are merely the manifestations, or the tip of the iceberg, that the marketplace sees.
It is because, for companies like Google, innovation erupts from the top line and oozes and meshes itself all the way through the company, its people and its processes until it finally solidifies at their bottom line products and market offerings.
The search for the holy grail of new product and service innovations usually centres on our products or store fit out, but in reality great innovation begins a lot closer to home.
The mindset of Google, and many other truly innovative businesses, companies and individuals, is to ensure that every fibre of their business, processes and thinking are steeped in a desire to provide a product or service that feeds their internal passion and resonates loudly with their marketplace.
In Oliver Wymans’s book, The Profit Zone, he discusses the notion of “Business Design”, which he describes as “a set of structural business choices that together deliver high utility to the customer and high value to the shareholder.”
Many businesses and consultants spend a lot of time focusing on giving customers what they want and think they need, but the fundamental questions is - What do we, the business, want, need and desirous of providing?
The questions that Wyman suggests we ask to find the answers are quite simple: What are the greatest growth opportunities that fall within your current customer channel? What profit model does your business design utilise to capture value? How do you protect sustainable cash flow? How can you rapidly test, learn and adjust for improved profitability of a new business design while at the same time managing the current operating model?
Business innovation rarely requires you to take risks; it rather requires you to learn how to shape risk.
By Morris Miselowski
» Filed Under Real Estate, Internet, Sales, Marketing, Finance, General, Business
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