Is it enough to be
innovative to be successful?
Innovation … it’s a frequently encountered buzzword,
appropriated by everyone from politicians to CEOs and all the way down the
pecking order. That’s
understandable. Enormous economic value
is attributed to the innovativeness of companies and governments. The
glitterati of the tech world – the Googles, Facebooks and Apples – are widely
perceived to be innovative companies.
The poster child for innovation is often held up to be Silicon Valley,
which has created a multibillion dollar industry affecting all aspects of our
lives, from what was essentially land under fruit orchards.
One government after another has sought to recreate this
magic formula, setting up tech-parks, innovation labs, incubators, and a host
of other facilities. There’s plenty of
evidence though, that although you can create the conditions for innovation,
you cannot command someone to innovate.
The basic premise for all this is that innovation leads to
success and economic value, growth, advances in human civilisation, etc. Yet, if we pause for a while, there is plenty
of evidence that innovation does not always lead to success.
History is littered with any number of innovative ideas and
products that have never taken off. You may be able to think of some yourself,
but like the 3D TV, 4-wheel steering in cars, virtual reality, Apple’s Newton, to
Betamax, brilliant ideas and concepts are no guarantee of success. In fact, many wildly successful companies
didn’t even have to be very innovative.
Apple didn’t create the smartphone with the iPhone; IBM did,
with the IBM Simon[1]
in 1993. Microsoft’s world-dominating
Windows adopted its GUI from Apple’s MacIntosh, and Apple got the idea from the
now-famous visit by Steve Jobs to Xerox’s PARC where he first saw the GUI and
the computer mouse in operation. Similarly, the inventors of the world’s first
spreadsheet, Visicalc, did not go on to become millionaires even though the
electronic spreadsheet is now pervasive.
The lesson is obvious, though it’s not one we like to hear: although
much of the advances in civilisation have been driven by innovation, innovation
by itself is no guarantee of success.
(In an interview in 1996, Steve Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good artists copy,
great artists steal”).
Given a multitude of innovative ideas, many, if not most,
wither and die while some bloom and succeed to become world-trendsetters.
Nature has the right idea: plants
generally produce a lot of seeds, of which only a small proportion will
actually grow, eventually, into trees.
For innovation to succeed, there are a host of other,
accompanying factors. These include
developing an ecosystem, lots of hard work, a fierce and passionate belief in
the innovation, and yes, a bit of luck.
On the ecosystem, remember how Microsoft back in the 1980s
built an ecosystem of developers who wrote applications that ran on the Windows
platform? In other words, their
ecosystem beat out that of Apple’s with world domination of the PC market at
stake. More recently, think of Apple’s
carefully-designed ecosystems built around its iOS platform. In fact, entire ecosystems are developed and
built around platforms, in the modern era.
Why would Google pay USD3.2B for Nest,[2] which
builds smart thermostats? It’s not how
many smart thermostats can be sold to recoup that investment, but rather the
platfform of interconnected things, and the ecosystem it attracts.
There are different kinds of innovation. We often think of
Product Innovation, as in a new product. An example is Apple’s iPhone, and
iPad, which have in and of themselves, spawned entire new industries.
There’s also Operational Innovation, which is tweaking or
reimagining the day-to-day operational aspects.
An early and obvious example is Henry Ford’s car assembly line, which
revolutionised mass production, while a more recent example is Toyota’s much
vaunted just-in-time system, which did away with inventory holding costs, among
other things.
Another form of innovation is Business Model Innovation.
Examples are the direct factory to consumer model behind the success of
companies from Dell to Xiaomi, and another is the M-Pesa mobile payments[3] [4]system by
Kenya’s Safaricom, which essentially bypassed the entire banking infrastructure
by moving banking into the hands of telecoms companies.
There are a good many lessons to learn about innovation, and
because the technology industry regularly and rapidly undergoes reinvention and
disruption, it’s a particularly fertile ground for innovation.
The next time you have an innovative idea, remember that
it’s not enough to have a great idea. There’s a long way to go from the idea to
the successful execution of an innovative idea, and if you fail, don’t be
discouraged, because you won’t be the first.
Lee Yu Kit is the
Chief Technology Officer of IBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd.
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