It seems that today everything is about innovation. Probably it is, but focusing only on how to innovate without understanding what it means, is a recipe for failure.
Everyone knows that innovation is vital to an organization’s ongoing health. Indeed, the creation of new products, services, processes, and profit models fuels the growth not just of companies but of our national and global economies.
Innovation is not all about technology, neither is about generating more money with less resources. It is neither and art, nor creativity. We need to move past the myths associated with innovation and understand it in its essence to be able to use it and apply it.
Innovation is a capability. But more than that, being innovative is to have a vision and be able to find a process that when put in practiced, will sustain a company’s profitable growth in a unique way.
For the past 30 years, innovation in the digital arena has been going straightforward. But mainly focus on applying technology to everything.
The Digital Revolution refers to the advancement of technology from analog electronic and mechanical devices to the digital technology available today. The era started to during the 1980s and is ongoing. The Digital Revolution also marks the beginning of the Information Era.
The Digital Revolution is sometimes also called the Third Industrial Revolution.
In the recent past, the biggest challenge was the pace of change. Things moved fast so we had to race to keep up. But over the next 20 years or so, we will be working with new technologies that we are just beginning to understand. That will greatly change the problems we will face. It won’t be just the pace of change, but the very nature of that change we will struggle with.
The force behind the emergence of this era is the unrelenting pace of both technology creation and changing customer wants. Technologies are evolving, customers are evolving, each feeds on the other and each accelerates the change in the other. This, in turn, causes companies and individuals to adopt and adapt to new means to innovate.
The world’s Best Innovators are not just the hot companies of the moment. On the contrary, they are often growing in traditional businesses. Best Innovators are often companies under pressure. Sometimes they face a threat of commoditization to a core product, or they might be contending with new entrants or an upstart technology.
Humans are smart-ly lazy. So we make tools to make our life easier. That is not necessarily bad, it leads us to innovation, and although we can argue that we are not smarter or happier now, that what we used to be 1000 years ago; we are moving toward great understanding of the human mind and the universe. We are learning by experiencing and disregarding every aspect of our life and not moving in a straight line to progress. That is probably inefficient, but is how humans have done it so far.
Some people thinks we are heading to a Recourse Based Economy, where automation will eliminate labor, money will becomes obsolete, and the daily aim of life is to enjoy ones fulfillment in hobby’s and studying to help enhance human life and restoration of the planet. We are far from that, but we need to start thinking about how we would like our lives to be in 20 or 40 years.
We still need money and use innovation to generate it fast. The digital era brought us many innovations, some of them in the form of real products we use every days such us our smartphones, the internet, the cloud, social media, etc. I’m more impressed with the innovations that we come up with to re think the established process we have to create disruptive ideas. For example in the area of marketing we now have moved away from the traditional product based advertising to general brans with personalities and using new tools such us Social Media ,Viral Content, Digital Signage, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, SEO Search Engine Optimization, Growth Hacking and many more yet to come.
The digital revolution not only affected products and the process we use to create them, digital disruption has already happened, wreaking on well-established organizations business models as well as changing entire industries. You either innovate, on your business is destined to disappear. Technology is changing everything, including your traditional way of conducting business.
As we enter this new era of innovation, collaboration will become a key competitive attribute. It will no longer be enough to be agile and disrupt, we will have to discover and build.