Success, Culture, Innovation and then, Innovators?
Success and Innovation are two words that can be understood is myriad ways. A huge range of internal and external factors affect the success and failure of any innovation. Clearly, in the recent years, there has been a huge push to encourage success through innovation. eventually, every idea, or the final product/service of it, must make an impact on the market. Excerpts from my conversation with Five Fingers, a company focussed on enhancing the quality of healthcare & education by developing innovative products and service using upcoming technologies like 3D printing, medical imaging, IoT, and analytics, brings out the intricacies of innovating. Happy reading!
Says Five Fingers:
You must remember that every market is different from each other. There are no simple or general solutions. An innovation which is successful in one market could fail miserably in another. There are no boilerplate solutions and no two competitive strategies are the same. Likewise, failure is not absolute. A failure is a way of eliminating ways to innovate. It is, for all means and purposes, useful and an essential part of creativity and the innovation process. There is no way to predict the success of any innovation before its introduction. This begs the question of what makes an innovation a success. And that is a very complex one. Suffice it to say that there are as many concepts and definitions of success such as commercialisation, customer purchases, market introduction, etc. Value -creation occupies a special place in this list of potential “success” metrics.
We consider Innovation as a continuous journey. You will meet many milestones of success and failure, each milestone is a checkpoint for learning and to correct your direction. Innovation comes out of persistent effort on disruptive ideas. It is about challenging adopted technology or methods and coming up with improved technology and methods. The key to survive and excel is to keep ahead in race. Disruption is a two-edge sword, at one side it kills various business model and ideas, and on the other it helps in improve business models, adding more products to business. In healthcare, the timeline and learning curve to adopt to new method is longer, this gives you enough time to optimise business model, if you are market aware.
No surprise that long term innovation is dependent on a return on what we deliver to the world. This is, however, a grey area — many successful innovations are not immediately profitable but are strategically set up to become profitable in time. Profit is probably not a logical measure of success for disruptive innovation. Instead, the lean should be on factors such as how the disruptor changes society, addresses a previously unsolvable problem or upsets the status quo. How an innovation redefines the way we see the world is perhaps more of a measure than anything else when we are thinking impact in the broader sense. In conclusion, each success story inspires more people to innovate. In turn, it opens new doors for future innovations. Thus, it has a cascading effect on innovation.
