I’m often asked whether I think organisations should just focus on incremental innovation or if they should be aiming for disruption and a more radical approach to grow their business.
In the day-to-day running of an organsiation, there is pressure to make profit and to sell more. Employees often describe their working day as relentless and the feeling of ‘paddling really hard just to stay still’.
Many years ago, I worked evenings and weekends at a Blockbuster video store. I enjoyed watching films and I had seen most of the films in stock and so was pretty good at helping customers choose something that they would like. I kept the store looking good, cleaned the windows, kept the videos in order, restocked the sweets and snacks and tried to upsell offers where I could. Whilst our store did well and made our targets, at the end of the day it didn’t really matter.
I could have been the most knowledgeable and highest performing sales person. We could have had all the latest releases. We could have had the most immaculate store. We could have delivered exceptional service to all our customers. We could have smashed our targets every quarter. We could have run the best store in the region.
Ultimately none of this mattered because as a company Blockbuster didn’t respond to the changing marketplace. In 2002 Lovefilm was born and grew to disrupt Blockbuster with a business model that meant people no longer had to travel to their nearest store – they could just order DVD’s online and they arrived in the post a day or two later. Then by about 2012 Lovefilm was disrupted as Netflix made it even more effortless for film watchers to get films delivered instantly to any internet connected device without even moving off the sofa.
So when people ask me which type of innovation they should focus on; incremental or disruptive, I think they are asking the wrong question.
It’s not a one or the other. It’s both. The question is, ‘how might we improve our day-to-day work and keep looking for new ideas that make life better for our customers?’
We must be doing the best job we can every day to provide the best experience for customers. We must also be looking at the marketplace and developing new products, services and business models that could provide something fundamentally better than our current model of ‘how we do things here’. And this may mean disrupting our business as we know it.
You can tweak your direct mail control pack all you like, improve the customer experience, make your internal processes more efficient, the list goes on. All of these things are important, but if you take your eye off the marketplace, and are not considering how you can fundamentally make life better for your customers then you are missing the point of being business in the first place.
Are you treating your customers like loyal Blockbuster customers but unbeknown to you they are really thinking about downloading Netflix?
Don’t let that happen to you.