Written by A. Karlan
At some point throughout your endeavors in entrepreneurship you may face, as many have, the daunting concept of innovation.
Make no mistake: innovation is a critical aspect of successful business models as it provides a competitive advantage for companies that must necessarily battle for control of market shares. Even so, innovation alone can not overcome a situation where the competition is so stiff that any potential upside is eroded away in the process: what we know as perfect competition in economics. To avoid perfect competition, companies must strive to build an “economic moat” that gives them a sustainable competitive advantage over time. While these protective moats can arise from several different sources, in today’s information economy they most often arise from the power of innovation.
When you search and study this ominous term, you will find that every successful entrepreneur with a social media personality will advertise their own formula for innovation, which can be comprised of anywhere between 5 and 10 discrete steps. There is a plethora of discourse to be found on the internet concerning this topic, with each person defining their own distinct method as the key to finding success and subverting competition. However, what is lost in this quagmire of development strategies and click-baity listicles is the true notion of innovation itself. That is to say, what actually changes the game in some notable way.
Following entrepreneurial guidelines for success may be wise, but it inherently is not innovative, no matter how many times the article you are reading may say so. This distinction is now a crucial issue commercial and creative producers are facing in a world rearranged by COVID-19: implementing innovative ideas and processes has swung from a helpful advantage to a critical necessity. To answer this demand, many companies have begun to come together to work openly at an unprecedented level, putting the ability to create value before the opportunity to make a buck, embracing a term coined “open innovation”. Open innovation has the potential to widen the space for value creation: It allows for many more ways to create value, be it through new partners with complementary skills or by unlocking hidden potential in long-lasting relationships. In a crisis, open innovation can help organizations find new ways to solve pressing problems and at the same time build a positive reputation.
The wave of innovative partnership has triggered a rapid evolution in our digital business concepts. Rather than the anticipated slow progression towards the virtualization of business, COVID-19 has pushed the necessity of contactless encounters to the foremost concern of businesses who wish to survive, let alone compete. Yet it remains true that uncertain times are wellsprings of opportunity. Though there are no established and certain paths for us to tread on, COVID-19 has also given us an opportunity to harness our collective will and, most importantly, to catalyze innovation and change.
This is what drives our belief that we must cater our mindset and our execution, not for the moment at hand but for the duration of the road that lays before us: innovating for the times as opposed to innovating just to match the times. One can reference the various sources of “what innovation is” endlessly but unless you are applying your innovative process in the right direction, it may not be enough, in these times, to keep up with the mind-numbing pace at which digital business is currently evolving. The post-coronavirus era will witness major changes at even faster rates, and that is why an open mindset toward agile innovation is all the more important. Forward-thinking innovation is the next step of our continued product and mindset evolution and now is the moment it needs to be actualized. The fragile and explosive state of the digital marketplace is a dead giveaway that those who wish to keep up with its twists and turns, long term, need to be readily adaptable and mindful of that changing topography.
