Building Better Products Through Innovation
“If you've always done it that way, it's probably wrong.” – Charles Kettering
Technological innovation is evolving at a rapid pace - in order to stay relevant in a highly competitive world - we need to innovate in order to solve business challenges customers are facing.
Change is the only thing that is constant in the era of innovation.
As new technologies are fast emerging and disrupting the way how challenges are tackled. The change needs to be considered as a driver for innovation. Companies that fail to adapt their businesses to these fast emerging changes and technological innovations and trends often fail eventually in the long run.
Companies that fail to read those market signals - and are reluctant to change would eventually lose out to the competition. One classic example is Nokia - which was an amazing company at one point and they were the market leader commanding a 40% share in the mobile market share across the world.
My entry into the connected world - happened through Nokia - and at that time it was very innovative and was doing what it was intended to do. As a company, Nokia has seen amazing success with their mobile devices and they had every possibility at their disposal to take the lead.
They were very well aware during the start of the 2000s that there is an emerging trend of smartphones & better user experiences coming - but they did not take the jump. This was probably because the leadership at that time did not take the market signals seriously. Moreover, there was a lack of company-wide alignment in the overall vision.
Nokia was a phenomenal success in the 90s - but due to a lack of innovation and failure to adopt emerging trends made the company lose out on the market opportunity.
I have been working with SMEs in Atlantic Canada - and during my conversations with small and medium enterprises - what I realized is they all know that there are challenges they need to act upon - but in the majority of cases - I see this reluctance from their side to change the way they are handling some of their critical business processes.
As I outlined above, change is the only thing that is constant in the era of innovation. Companies should prepare themselves for emerging market trends.
Following are some of the key questions that companies can ask themselves - to better prepare themselves for the emerging challenges:
- What is actually driving the business? What is the business goal/objective?
- Are we giving value to the customers through our solutions?
- How is the business doing in terms of innovation? What are trends that can possibly the business?
I believe - the times are rapidly changing, and in order to stay relevant - we need to keep innovating, keep upgrading our business processes and always be open to change. Because that is the only way businesses can succeed and thrive in the long run. I wrote about some of the emerging technologies (as per Gartner Hype Cycles 2022) - that we need to watch. You can read the article here: Innovation
What do you think about innovation in your business? Is your business ready to change its approach? Is innovation important for your business?
I am a product management professional based in Halifax, Canada and I write about technology, innovation, entrepreneurship and business strategy. You can learn more about me at the following link: https://iamgrt.com