Leading Factors: innovate or die slowly
August 2, 2008 by Miki Saxon
From IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future (a steady Saturday feature since July 12; be sure and download your free copy).
The second of the five critical traits is innovative beyond customer imagination, which translates to giving customers what they truly want before they ask and even before they think of it.
It’s not about selling them what they don’t need; it’s about anticipating needs and innovating even when the results disrupt your current product line.
But to whom are you actually selling?
“In rapidly developing economies worldwide, the middle class is growing (sadly, that isn’t true in the US) and becoming progressively more prosperous…significant wealth accumulation among aging baby boomers and a corresponding increase in young, affluent inheritors.”
Many of the best ideas are coming more and more from customer interaction, not just in content, but in real products as seen at Dell’s IdeaStorm.
Real innovation requires real investment.
“Financial outperformers are currently devoting more than 30 percent of their total annual investments to capture opportunities from rising prosperity worldwide… Outperformers plan to spend 36 percent more to serve these increasingly sophisticated customers”
The other thing business is learning, in many cases the hard way, is that BS, promises and talk-without-action will kill them.
“With the billion-user Internet, customers can broadcast expectations and share views worldwide—and publicly grade a company’s performance against them. Like-minded customers can network socially and pool their influence. And in increasing numbers of industries, customers are swapping passive roles for much deeper involvement.”
The case study is a great example of a company that returned from the almost dead through this kind of innovation is Nintendo…
“In the early 1990s, Nintendo’s share of the game console market was 61 percent, but by the mid-2000s, it had fallen to 22 percent. … Nintendo is once again ahead of its competitors, with 44 percent market share.”
How do you foster customer interaction?
Your comments—priceless
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Image credit: el3enawe ( سبحان الله وبحمده ) CC license
Excellent point about Nintendo. They were floundering until they came up with a revolutionary concept. I’m not just talking about the new way to play video games, but a system that the whole family can play. Games have become almost a solitary past time. Now that the Wii is here, people are having parties and the main theme is the Wii.
Karl, thanks for stopping by and adding to the conversation.
I think the really crucial focus is that they didn’t come up with Wii on their own.
“Nintendo went straight to the source — gamers themselves. The company established an online community by offering incentives in return for customer information. The company also selected a group of experienced gamers based on the value and frequency of their community contributions. These “Sages” were given exclusive rewards, like previews of new games, in exchange for helping new users and providing
community support.”
I seriously doubt that the philosophic basis of the Wii could have come from the developers without all that input.
Of course, Nintendo’sr execution has been masterly.