Geared For Profit

You need more profit, growth , and product changes. You know you need to differentiate , niche, position , brand and develop loyalty.

This is all innovation.

Seth Godin says you need to be remarkable. This helps reinforce – small changes, or bandaids, are generally not enough.

Surely you can’t make or review all these changes at once. You need a structure to help you reduce clutter and focus.

You can make innovation at several distrinct places in your company:
– business model
– marketing strategy
– branding innovation
– product changes
– pricing changes
– sales techniques
– customer service changes
– customer retention plans
– customer referral

Changes towards the top of the list generally cost more, requires more vision, and generally is a bigger risk.

The bigger changes (towards the top of the list) clearly require more buyin – from higher levels of management, the CEO, and even the board.

You will also have the potention to make much more profit from the innovative changes that are more aggressive. You can literally blow open a market, and make competitors irrelevant by business model changes.

Having said bigger is better, many innovations might be WRONG for you:
– you might like smaller changes – so you can manage the risk
– you might not have senior enough buyin
– you might not be able to find the right ideas
– you may not require big changes to meet your goals

As you get more comfortable with innovation, you will find the real value is innovation at more than one level at the same time, like:
– branding and pricing changes
– business model and changes in marketing channels

But again, starting with smaller changes, with one dimension is easier, and less risk to start with.

My suggestion would be for you to work out:
– what are your goals for the company
– do you need small incremental change, or do you need more significant change
– what sort of senior buyin do you have ?
– how much risk can you stomach ?

Targeting your effort to where innovation will best fit your organisation’s needs should now be the obvious answer.

So when you hear – “we need product or price changes” – ask yourself – is that the WRONG place to innovate ?