Can innovation really transform a market? Yes, if you start.

Let’s first have a think about what innovation means. According to Wikipedia, “Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs.”
In other words, new ways of doing new things for people who don’t always know they could be better off, yet.”

What innovation is not: any product being displayed at a trade show for anything other than the first time, an idea that doesn’t make it to market or an iterative product development. If you’ve got ‘innovation’ over your show booth in any of these cases, shame on you.

The term market transformation is the strategic process of intervening to create lasting change in market behaviour, by removing identified barriers or exploiting opportunities to accelerate the adoption of new products as a matter of standard practice.

The core of the solution is you. More precisely, how companies (like yours) engage to make a difference.

Innovation, regrettably, is too often a discipline of last resort. Necessity being the mother of invention when revenues start to dip away because of new competitive activity, many people suddenly starting to look around for the magic bullet. While this can work, it also generates pressure and a bias towards disaster mitigation-based decision making, i.e. short-termism.

Far better, then, to take time while things are good to create a view of the future and decide how to exploit the opportunity.
Whether you believe you can foretell the future or not, you’re right. But not trying leaves you exactly where you are today: under threat. This is a drum we bang repeatedly and unapologetically. It’s a basic requirement of business management and yet ignored almost universally, especially among established SMEs.

So – leave your office, get out and even surf the net. See who is doing what in your market and start to build a picture of what you’ll need to do to thrive in 2, 3, 5, 10 years. Do this right and plan to meet the new need.

If you need help to generate views of your future, we’re here. Future forecasting and scenarios planning is what we do. We guarantee to leave you with ideas for a transformed market that you would not have got to by yourself. After all, as a clever person once said, “madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

Can innovation really transform a market? Yes, so start.

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