Innovations are in the mission of helping a growing body of people to serve their purposes increasingly better. Hence, we need bursts of thrust to sustain Innovation to keep penetrating deeper into society. For creating those bursts, we need innovative ideas out of technology. Hence we need to keep managing technologies and ideas. Besides, if incumbent innovators fail to offer the plausible bursts of thrust, new entrants show up to keep empowering innovations serving the society increasingly better.
Innovations are like a spacecraft. They are in the mission of serving purposes of customers increasingly better. They need to keep getting deeper into serving an increasing number of customers with growing satisfaction. However, how to get the momentum to keep getting deeper into the market? Like space crafts, bursts of thrust sustain innovation in its mission of penetrating deeper into the market. Innovation thrust comprises of purposes a product serves and the quality of serving those purposes. The volume of customers who are willing to pay for the innovation is determined by both number of purposes and the quality. By adding more features, innovators increase the breadth of serving purposes.
The depth or quality of serving those purposes distills from the quality of the product’s innovative features. Hence, for diving deeper into the market, innovators keep releasing successive better versions. Invariably, the latest version has a set of new features and also a sub-set of improved features. These new and improved features combinedly create a burst of thrust to the innovation to get deeper into the market.
Bursts of thrust sustain innovation—in historical perspectives
Let’s look into the microwave oven. In 1947, it came into the market to help customers serve heating food purposes better than before. However, the limited number of purposes this innovation could serve. Besides, the poor-quality created a low willingness to pay among a tiny number of customers. Hence, innovators embarked on improving existing features and adding new features to create successive bursts of thrust to sustain this innovation to create appeal among an increasing number of households, offices, restaurants, hotels, and other establishments. Those bursts of thrust also kept making successive releases less costly. Hence, the volume of sales kept growing.
The evolution of the automobile also gives us a valuable lesson. In 1886, Carl Benz’s automobile came out as a rudimentary 3-wheeler. Only a few people expressed willingness to pay for that innovation. Since then, automakers have been releasing successive better versions. These better versions have an increasing number of new features. For example, modern automobiles have many features which previous versions did not have. It begins with an air conditioner, audio system, video player, adaptive cruise control, and many more. Moreover, the quality of existing features kept also improving. The addition of new features and improvement of existing ones has been offering one after another burst of thrust for empowering automobile innovation to keep penetrating deeper. Hence, automobile production per year has been increasing over the last more than 100 years, reaching above 90 million.
Underlying repetitive patterns of giving bursts of thrust to sustain innovation penetrating deeper
Examples of bursts of thrust to sustain innovation to keep getting deeper into the society are all around us. For example, mobile phones are now in the hands of virtually all adults. However, it used to weigh 40 kg in 1956. Even in the 1980s, its weight was 2lbs. Over the last 40 years, there has been a race for creating bursts of thrust out of innovative features in empowering this innovation to keep diffusing in society. Similarly, in the 1940s and 1950s, Radios and TVs were bulky and also expensive. Sony improved features and added new ones with Transistor technology in giving a needed burst of thrust to them sustain the diffusion deeper into the society.
Megatrends offer the opportunity for creating bursts of thrust and also create entry opportunity
Technology, infrastructure, and customers’ preferences are continuously changing. Often such changes create megatrends. Each of those relevant megatrends creates the opportunity of adding innovative features to products and improving existing ones for creating a burst of thrust. For instance, megatrend out of increasing computational power, mobile Internet, and advancement of display technologies created the opportunities of adding innovative features to mobile phones. Hence, innovators took advantage of it by adding PDA-like features. The mobile phone expanded its capability to serve additional purposes for a growing number of users. Subsequently, those features gave a burst of thrust to sustain mobile phones go deeper into the market.
The uprising of megatrends also creates an entry opportunity for new entrants. For example, MP3 format of music, Internet, flash, and disk storage technology created a megatrend for adding innovative features in the portable music player. It was an opportunity of giving a burst of thrust to a portable music player to sustain its penetration far deeper in the market. However, Sony failed to take this advantage to jack up the sale of the next version of Walkman. Consequentially, Sony’s failure created an entry opportunity for Apple. Hence, Apple came up with a new set of innovative features for the portable music player, giving birth to the iPod.
Technology, idea, innovation, and preference management for creating bursts of thrust to sustain innovation
Along with the growth of megatrend, customers’ preferences also keep changing. For example, due to the growth of mobile Internet, customers started showing the preference of using mobile handsets to perform many more things, in addition to making a voice call. Similarly, users have been growing preferences for using microwave oven in cooking food dishes in addition to heating food. The list goes on. Innovators should keep acquiring technologies and developing ideas—which are both technologically feasible and economically viable—to meet those preferences.
Hence, the release of the next versions having features of meeting those preferences empowers the innovations to penetrate deeper into the market. Accruing and developing those ideas that create the burst of thrust out of suitable technologies is the core capability in managing innovation in the market. Hence, the focus should be on systematically acquiring technologies, and developing ideas to keep releasing innovative features for increasingly meeting customer preferences better is the core of innovation management.
Entry strategy out of a burst of thrust to sustain innovation
Of course, the performance of Apple’s iPod and iPhone is magical. Are they creative bursts of a Genius like Steve Jobs? Of course, not. In both of these cases, Apple was later comer. Predecessors’ products were already in the market. The first one is the portable music player, and the other one was the smartphone. In both of these products, megatrends were offering the opportunity of giving a burst of thrust to respective products. However, incumbent innovators were doing a mee too job in offering better versions in their target jobs done incrementally better–as opposed to giving a big push. Thus, they were failing to take advantage of megatrend for substantially improving their innovations.
Hence, Apple showed up. Apple did far better jobs than others in creating a burst of thrust out of innovative features in pushing portable music player first– and then smartphone—to sustain the diffusion far deeper into the market. Both added new features and improvement of existing features in the form of iPod, and iPhone expanded their respective market far bigger than in the past. Moreover, for creating magical successes, Apple has been releasing successive better versions of iPhone.
Similarly, there are many other examples similar to Apple’s entry strategy out of giving a push in sustaining the journey of target innovations to keep getting deeper in society. Thus, there has been a pattern. Hence, innovators should keep in detecting such patterns and responding to them in creating successful entries. They should also keep releasing successive better versions to keep giving successive bursts of thrust to sustain innovation keep penetrating deeper into the market.
The unstoppable mission of innovations demands to look at patterns
Therefore, innovation is not magic. It’s not about randomly experimenting with ideas, either. There have been patterns in its mission of serving customers’ purposes increasingly better. Like a spacecraft, they need bursts of thrust at regular intervals to sustain penetration. It’s an unstoppable journey. If incumbents fail to thrust out innovative features, new entrants show up to keep empowering innovations serving humans’ purposes increasingly better. Hence, it’s time to look at the underlying patterns for systematically extracting value by keep giving bursts of thrust to sustain innovation to get deeper into society.
