Innovation-The Second Wave

As the year draws to an end, it just occurred to me that this is not just another holiday season but the end of a decade and what a decade it has been! Recession, terrorism, social networking, T-20, Global economy …. shook the foundations of the world that we were used to. These cataclysmic events that occurred in this decade made it the decade that truly changed the world.

Now that I think about it, every decade had an idea, a philosophy, a thought process, a laissez faire so to speak the defined the events and happenings in that period. The 50’s and early 60’s was characterized by the baby boomers , The late 60’s and Early 70’s saw the birth of flower power and the 80’s and 90’s was dominated by liberal and capitalistic ideologies. These seemingly irrelevant sub-cultures and idiosyncratic ways of life sometimes defined the entire future of an economy.

That brings me to this decade. One philosophy or a thought process that cut across all fields and that defined this decade was Innovation. Whatever happened in this decade was because of this one ideology. The decade of the grey caps. Some had their caps on right, others tried to pull a rabbit out of a cap and we all know the result. As this roller coaster ride of a decade comes to an end, a simple yet predominant question lingers …What Next?

Everything has alternative today and the rate of obsolence is almost at the same pace as innovation. If some how you manage to stay ahead of this vicious cycle, The Chinese will bring out a replica that costs half as much and does twice as much the original. This puts the so called innovators in a quandary. How do they keep up with the Joneses?

So far, Innovation as an ideology has been applied only to the product or the core element of business.

In the next decade, innovators have to shift from the product centric approach and take a wholistic approach in order to sustain this pace and take the pole position. They need to collaborate with the customer rather than just sell.

Apple Inc. is a good example of this wholistic approach of innovation. It is the only company that provides the entire package ,meaning the software, the hardware and all the other bells and whistles to its client along with product. In its I-phone, it has given the customer not a product but a platform with obscene amount of scalability. It is for this reason its products are considered superior and have been able to hold its own in the face of competition.

The critics might and in all possibility will disagree with me.. but hey! They are just doing their job.

The second wave of innovation has to be a collaborative effort rather than just a science project in a garage that hit the jackpot. Innovation should not limit itself to a product but rather spread across all other aspects of business.

Time for thinking out of the box is over. It's about time you ripped the box apart!