“Good” beats “innovative” nearly every time
Management speak about innovation can probably run into hundreds of pages with fancy management terms sometimes entering another stratosphere of complexity in implementation. But here’s Scott Berkun providing a breath of fresh air and common sense. He debunks the prevailing obsession with innovation. Instead he advocates a simpler and more effective solution: Just be good. And he says that “‘Good’ Beats ‘Innovative’ Nearly Every Time”. Find the excerpts below:
One troubling recent phenomenon is the push for everyone to be innovators. Many things we buy and use never work in the way we’re promised, which suggests there are opportunities in merely being good: Much of what’s made falls short of that mark.
From my studies of the history of business innovation, I’m convinced you can beat competitors and even dominate markets without fancy tricks.
While we’re fond of trumpeting the praises of Apple, whose iPod revolutionized music, we forget how dismal the competition was. It was not a field of masterpieces; it was a motley crew of ugly, clunky, painfully hard-to-use devices. Apple applied basic design sense to an immature field at a time when the world was ready for something better.
Google was launched a decade after the invention of search engines; Amazon was not the first online bookstore. But they were both the first to do a good job at selling their good services for a good profit. In retrospect, their successes seem amazing, but at the time, the goals were simple and the objective humble and clear: Be good, or at least better than the other guys. For they knew that alone was hard enough.
Executives and consultants throw it (the word ‘innovation’) around like magic dust, hoping to cover their ignorance of why products and companies have done well or failed. But it’s clear most companies fail not because of their lack of inventiveness; it’s their lack of basic competence.
Innovation, in the simplest definition, means new or novel, to take an approach others have not seen before. But by this definition, the iPod and Firefox barely qualify.
In all cases, these are entrants into fields of established players. Their creators borrowed parts and ideas from other products and even from other companies. Their success or failure is driven less by revolutionary ideas or radical disruptive breakthrough thinking and more by a focus on making solid, reliable, simple, good products that solve real needs people have.
All things being equal, in a battle between a good product and an innovative one, the good one will usually win. Those obsessed with innovation contract the disease of hubris, ignoring many good ideas because they have been used before. They forget that an old idea cleverly reused, or borrowed from a different field, will be new to the world.
If you insist on doing something new, take this advice: Start with the important problems your customers, or your competitors’ customers, have and try to solve them. If conventional approaches fail, you’ll be forced to invent and be creative as a side effect of your goal. If you ask the creators of so-called breakthrough ideas, this is a common reason they found those breakthroughs in the first place.
Making better things is difficult enough. Learn to do that well, and when you’re done, and your customers and stockholders love you, the label “innovator” will magically land next to your name.
Link to the story: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2010/id20100222_506858.htm
