Pace of Innovation
Dictionary.com defines innovation as:
1. something new or different introduced
We’ve all spent countless hours mulling over something or other to be innovated: a new beer cooler, a urinal toy (thanks Drillings), a new cell processor, in-game advertising, etc. A few of us actually do innovate and sometimes come up with a product or service that is a hit: Sergei & Larry, Andy Grove, Trip Hawkins, and countless other innovators.
As more and more people create a new product or service, or better yet, make one better, the pace of innovation increases. Ray Kurzweil predicted that information technology doubles it’s power every year (price, performance, capacity, bandwidth).
Is the pace of innovation too fast? That’s the question that I’ve been asking myself recently. Lets use the following example: For a few summers, I worked on developing a large scale social community around college and high school students. We spent quite a bit of time and hours around this community and were rated fairly highly thru marketshare statistics. Afterall, we owned one of the best domain names, Student.com. A few years later, TheFacebook.com showed up and stole the scene. Many me-too players emerged and KickApps enabled the world to create social community websites, similar to Facebook and others. Hundreds of social networks emerged including networks around pickles, hockey, dark chocolate, stiletto heals, traveling to Idaho, and broken iPhones. Whether or not these are good concepts or not, many of these received some venture or private funding and began building out their own little dynasty. That is… until the next wave of innovation spurs and these are either acquired or slowly die a quiet death.
Innovation is occuring so frequently that many times, business models aren’t flushed out yet and the company goes under. We’re trying to innovate and create as much as possible and the financial markets are supporting it (so far).
A few notes to take away from this:
- Investors are in a tough spot because of this. Since innovation occurs so regularly, investing into a company without a defendable plan is going to be a rough ride. Very few will make it.
- We may be more Darwinian than ever. I’m not philisophical but this holds fairly true IMHO. Only the strongest survive is going to play out over time because the world is flat and people have many choices.
- Your idea is not new is holding true. I’ve stressed this before, but your idea is currently being executed somewhere else in this world. Get ready for competition. Case in point: I’m advising on a project that we thought was earth shattering and as we started talking to people, we realized that we were 9 months behind another company. Pace of innovation is speeding up.
How do you win the war? That’s the trillion dollar question. Build your organization to be as nimble and dynamic as possible, but don’t lose sight of your original vision. You can’t win the war alone either. There are people and companies out there that you can partner with to get your product to market faster, efficiently, and stronger. Go and find them.
Lets innovate.