The Economist summarises the latest thinking on the subject by big companies, including some such as 3M, Nokia and Google that are undoubtedly very good at innovation.
Just about everybody seems to agree that it’s not the idea itself but the hard work that follows afterwards that matters. But some are thinking too about the filtering process – about how to pick the winners from a lot of competing business ideas.
“The more ideas a firm comes up with, the more important it is for bosses to decide early on which of them to kill off. This is to avoid heading down countless and costly dead ends.”
There’s hope too for new small firms in all this, as one of the mistakes big companies often make when innovating is in pandering to the exotic requests of their existing most profitable customers.
It may be “better to make things simpler and easier for the bottom and middle of the market, rather than add needless bells and whistles for the handful of top customers who can afford and demand them”.
If you haven’t got many customers yet you may paradoxically be in a very good position to understand what people really need. You have less to unlearn than your established rivals.
As Edwin Land, the inventor who founded Polaroid, said “people who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea”.
Print this post
