Technological Innovation and Leadership – The Guide to Successful Innovations (The 7th of a Many Part Series)
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Technological Innovation and Leadership – The Guide to Successful Innovations (The 7th of a Many Part Series)
The previous post dealt with:
1) Customization
2) Convenience
3) Participation
Today I am going to try and deal with how innovative products need to deal with:
4) Anticipation
5) Compatibility
Just to refresh your mind, the three meta generic benefits are Freedom of Choice, Conservation of Costs, and Help. To read more about those click here.
Anticipation - Anticipation basically deals with the firms’ ability to understand the consumer and be one-step ahead of him/ her. Mind you the ‘one’ step is key – if firms anticipate too quickly they may lose sync with their customers.
Anticipation stems more out of market research and consumer insight and helps makes an innovation relevant. Let’s again go back to Nike Plus. The clear insight with respect to any person who runs, or even trains for any sport such as swimming for that matter is that they often like to reveal to the world how much they run. Their conversations often revolve around the fact that they run 10 Kilometers everyday and that this keeps them fit etc. Most runners, it is a known fact – listen to music while running. Nike Plus anticipated that need to share stats with the rest of the World – that I think was key.
By the way – for any brand looking to use social networking and make users connect – it first needs to identify what users are looking to share, or if they are looking to share at all in the first place.
So apart from that Nike Plus also took the musical experience beyond music by offering the user stats such as heart rate, distance covered, speed etc. These tools also made the runner perceive that he had some sort of control over his running experience.
Thus for anticipation to be ‘successful’, firms need to ‘know’ their consumers well. They need to know what their talking points are. Again I stress on the fact that if a brand wants to capitalize on social networking, it must know what the talking points for its consumers are.
Compatibility: To put it simply, if a new product or service requires a change in consumer behviour to use it, it is not compatible. Now this may seem like a paradox because – “aren’t innovative products supposed to be out of the box?”
Well, I don’t think so. I think innovative products that want to be ready for market success need to work on established models and stretch them to the extent that they can actually extend the “generic use benefits” for customers.
Consider the MacBook OS – Leopard or Tiger. Anyone who has used it knows that its main benefit over a Windows OS is that it is based on a Linux interface and thus does not run .exe files, which is the cause of many viruses. That makes the system more sustainable.
Apple may claim that the system is “smart and intuitive” – I would say BullShit. The Mac OS quite clearly derives a lot from the Windows platform in terms of its features and functions and segregations. It quite clearly is working on an established model and working doubly hard to extend the benefits that an OS provides. So that may result in certain cosmetic as well as use related changes but in effect the central segregations and features such as Search, Documents, a ‘Contol Panel’ etc. remain. Mind you – that does not mean that the Mac OS is worse – I am just trying to outline that as an innovator you need to understand that people have set thinking patterns and it is very difficult to change them – you need to work around their existing patterns and then maybe alter their perspectives.
Most “innovations” fail because they are not either compatible with consumers’ needs or their thought process.
Tomorrow il try and round up this part of the series by dealing with Innovations and how they are affected by:
6) Ease of Use
7) Ease of Trial
8) Observability of Features
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