In many ways, the word 'innovation' has become a bit of a buzzword. We find ourselves using the word all the time. But what I want to flag is that any new method, idea, product, or service does not become an innovation simply by being viable under laboratory conditions. To do innovations the right way, you have to make sure it succeeds in today’s markets. And not just today, but continues to scale up to become a sustainable business.
What we can learn from innovations that ‘failed’
Let me give you two examples of innovations that still have immense potential but are counted as "tech fails"
Invented in 1921, pagers were very popular around 25 years ago – in the 1990s. If you saw someone with a pager you probably thought – this seems to be someone important enough to be reachable at a moment's notice. And that’s what a pager was used for, for decades since its invention. The technology was reserved strictly for critical communications between emergency responders like police officers, firefighters, and medical professionals.
Now, before telling the story any further, let me spend a minute talking about the technology behind pagers. Basically, each device contained a small receiver that delivered a radio message individually to those carrying the device. You could also use a pager to deliver instant messages to many people at the same time without any time lags – a critical function in situations where minutes matter. As far as communications technology goes, even today's smartphones can't compete with the reliability of the paging network. If the mobile or Wi-Fi network off of which a mobile phone operates isn’t good, the phone won’t work. As we all know, cellular networks quickly become overloaded if too many people are using it. This doesn't happen with paging networks.
So, you see, one can’t really say that this a technology that was 'replaced' by mobile networks, though a lot of people believe that is what happened. Instead, in the attempt to scale up the reach, it probably lost out on what was its core constituency: people in need of a reliable emergency communication device.
Let’s look at a second example: the wearable technology Google Glass, unveiled by the planet’s number one search engine in 2012. You will remember the product’s impressive launch, with skydivers wearing the product streaming live feeds, among other things. In as little as 3 years, Google took the product off the shelves. So, what happened? Some say it was too expensive, but let’s not forget that Apple sells phones that are dearer than the average computer, and has been doing so for a decade. What really hit the Google glass hard were concerns around privacy, because you could basically record anything you were seeing through the glasses, without anyone the wiser.
The lessons from these two examples – and many more like them – is that an innovation, once lab-tested and greenlighted, needs to be managed, to make sure it launches and follows a sustainable market growth path. The role of an innovation manager, seen in this light, will become very crucial in the coming times, especially with the advent of AI in a big way.
So how do you do innovations right? In other words, what is the job of an innovations manager?
Separate the innovation from the market strategy
First, think of the innovation and the strategy to roll it out as two different things. The innovation is basically a discovery, and the discovery, by itself, is not a business strategy. Tim Kastelle, innovation researcher and teacher from the University of Queensland Business School, has come up with a matrix to assess the competency level of the innovation, and this is a good place to start testing your innovation.
The next thing to start thinking about is the strategy, and it is here that design thinking comes in useful. Steve Jobs famously defined the problem the problem as “1000 songs in my pocket” when he started out to build the iPod. That’s a razor-sharp product vision. Even if you are grappling with a more complex problem, such as a product to help steer through Delhi’s air pollution, design thinking will help you make the problem you are trying to solve as user-centric and focused as possible.
Use the services of an established innovation lab
When you have an innovation that is expected to be out-of-line with current ways of doing business, you have what is called a disruptive innovation. The value of disruptive innovations isn’t immediately apparent: think of Ola is the years it had just been introduced. Disruptive innovations usually solve a problem that others don’t see a value in. To go back to the iPod example, consumers didn’t really know they needed to carry around their favourite songs till the product came into their hands. The paradox of disruptive innovations is that even venture capitalists who invest in them expect them to fail the market test most of the time.
This is the reason why so many companies have established innovation labs, with varying degrees of market connectivity, where innovations can be test-driven before pumping in huge resources to launch and sustain them.
Make sure you are in the right geography
The right way of doing innovations also includes placing them in the right geographies in which they can grow and sustain.
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, innovations – especially tech innovations – are considered the domain of a few geographies, India not being one of them. For a country that supplies a huge percentage of the actual product developers and managers to the best innovation labs and top companies in the world, this is a gap that is somewhat puzzling – and probably doesn’t make business sense.
If you have an innovation in mind, think where you’d like to grow it – think of spaces that can provide you the supplies and the human resources, the power of industry expertise, design thinking and innovation management. If you are an innovator based in the Asia-Pacific, for instance, places such as Bangalore and Gurgaon should definitely be on your radar.
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