Why Companies Need To Innovate Or Get Left Behind
This article is part of a spotlight series featuring thought leadership pieces submitted by Pathship’s experts. This week, Andrew McGregor shares his thoughts on the importance of innovating.
Innovation and consumer-centricity have recently become the mantras of businesses around the world. Surprisingly, these critical elements to a sustainable venture were not always at the heart of every organization. In a global economy with high transparency, easy access to alternatives, and decreasing barriers to competitor entry, most businesses can no longer rest on their laurels and survive with a static offering. Even successful innovators are aware that a single success is insufficient.
Businesses that were once happy and profitable, are now struggling to adapt in the changing environment. For many companies, their focus on delivering with the least cost has also resulted in a streamlining of capability. This has undermined their ability to adapt and flex — “it’s just not how we operate”. The area where this mindset has made its greatest impact is in Learning and Development (L&D).
For most organizations, L&D has been reduced to delivering the bare minimum of people development, largely for the “high potential” few, rather than upskilling and capability building throughout the organization. Typically, these businesses believe that the market will develop the main body of skills they will require in potential employees. While this may have been true in the past, no longer will this be a reliable talent source going forward. With younger generations viewing work in more flexible ways, new technologies creating demand for new skills, and many forms of work becoming largely unpopular to the workforce, how should companies adapt?
Moving forward, employers will need to become academy companies, capable of developing and growing talent to meet their operational needs — even at the risk of other companies poaching their talent. While this notion will be rejected by many companies who see themselves taking from others, it will be the innovators who realize that governments and educators will be way too slow in the development of skills. New skills for tomorrow are needed today, and innovators will not wait for institutions to develop the courses of study to deliver the in-demand skills. This will become the role of businesses. Finding ways to make real-time, on-demand learning possible will be the challenge for businesses. While platforms enabling development are already coming online, the company culture necessary to become a learning-organisation will remain the challenge for many.
Learning can no longer be a reactive response to business development. For innovators and leaders it will become a proactive approach — with learning formalized and structured through dynamic expert networks, collaboration, and experimentation. Followers or “laggers”, will be able to access the course and textbook over time, but by then, the leaders will have already moved on to the next big thing.
You don’t have to look far to see the future from here. But that also means there isn’t a lot of time for businesses to realign their organization to become learning agile, or face the very real likelihood of being left in the wake of true innovators.
Contributed by our Pathship Expert Andrew
About Andrew: Passionate about creating great workplaces & future careers for all. Particularly people with disability. A career (20+years) HR practitioner with global FMCG & retail experience. A motorcycle riding sailor with cross cultural skills and a passion for travel.
Click here to view Andrew’s Pathship profile.
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