"Innovate or die!" This is a very common mantra repeated by many commentators of the business world. They state that you must innovate your business in order to stay ahead of the death curve.
There is a graveyard of businesses that are used as examples of very large companies that met the reaper when they decided to keep the status quo of their yesteryear and shelved their innovation, if they had any innovation at all. The employees that experienced the plunge from the inside of the sinking ship, in retrospect, say that the company or themselves just completely misread consumers or emerging trends or technologies and said it was dismissed as nothing but temporary fads.
What is the innovation and why is it missed by the companies with the largest resources and talent? It's missed because the emerging trends tend to happen very slowly at the start and doesn't get real legs till it starts to become wildly adopted, and when that happens, it does so very quickly and often exponentially.
Large companies, for the most part, move very slowly and so cannot spot trends that move as slow or slower than themselves, but they cannot move fast to catch up either. The emerging trends, either it be a business model, advertisement market, product technology or brand positioning, take the shape of the infamous bell-shaped curve.
The most famous of this bell-shaped curve used for business analogy purposes, is what they call the product life cycle. The early adopters come in at the beginning and then the majority comes in after that, and it eventually matures and dies off. That is why the mantra is repeated "Innovate! Innovate! Innovate!" If you follow a very liner path of small incremental changes or slow changes to your business, then you will miss the curve and go straight into flat line.
Besides moving slowly, some businesses also have short-term vision or mindset. It's about the end of the month or quarter, maybe end of the year is pushing it as the horizon of goal setting. While it is very difficult to forecast any future that has some months or years in front of it, innovation requires the future to be planted now and germinate to a tree in greater time spans than what a company needs to hit top line sales for the month.
When Kodak missed digital cameras and Blockbuster missed home delivery and streaming, it's because they looked short, missed what trend was moving slower than them, and couldn't catch up once that trend moved fast to wild adoption and completely upset their traditional business model or offering.
Example of a trend moving slow is blockchain. Even if everyone is talking about it, even if it seems like just a passing fad, it would be worth paying very close attention to this. Innovate or die!
