Thousand times I heard about big companies
lose abilities to innovate successful, but I didn’t totally understand why
these failures always happed. This article really gives me a reasonable explanation.
That’s true-- innovation is just not in big
companies’ DNA. They need to give up something when they gain big success. When there is one more thing to considerate, there is less chance
to achieve success. Too many things need to be considerate while a big company makes
a whatever decision. It remind me about experiences in big companies, I had to
wait for couple of weeks or even months for just a simple idea approved by managers,
senior managers, directors, and executives. That would take some efforts to
explain—they need to take so long time to make a small decision, don’t mention
a brand new innovated product. To launch a new product, big company should
persuade most of leaders. Once one leader hold negative attitude, it’s would be
harder and more time consuming for them to make plan into real. But for a
start-up company, it’s would only take a night from make a plan to take an
action.
What’s more, just as the article said, the
fatal reason why big companies can’t innovate is they put too much care on
profit and recent customers. Big companies are already successful, so they won’t
take any risk. Faced with innovated products, they always think about how to
cut cost and make more profit. But a new product always won’t show high profitability
at the beginning as mature products. And if big companies always focus on
existing customer segment, maybe they will do a good job on customer
relationship, but they will never expand customer segment in a new area.
I can’t help but wondering, how if a big
company totally separates its innovation team or new product manages team and
trade them just as a small start-up company? Will that big company gains the
same successful as start-ups? Or at least has the same opportunities to gain
success? However, I didn’t hear a successful example of that. How do you think
about that?
Reference:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/why_big_companies_cant_innovate.html
Reference:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/why_big_companies_cant_innovate.html
Hey Nan,
ReplyDeleteYour blog made me think of an interesting concept I've never really been able to put my finger on. You mentioned how bringing up a new product or innovation requires you explain the concept/idea several times. I work in the R&D field and a lot of days, I feel like more of a salesaman (not that there's anything wrong with that) than an engineer. It's incredible how you honestly have to SELL an idea and get managers/exec's to really buy into the concept that you idea really is a good one.
Thanks for the post.
-Brendan
More so with larger companies, they may be in a period of growth or success with high profits and be tempted with the thought to not innovate and just ride the wave.
ReplyDeleteBrendan- your point of having to "sell" an idea to upper management is very true. I think the selling points are not always that the idea will bring good things to the company, but also reminding the upper management of the day-to-day happenings of their own company. They sometimes forget their target customer and employees and how the two are relating.