Until few years ago, most companies were focused on process improvements or incremental changes. The terminology mostly used were cost optimization, economies of scale, quality, time to market (at decent pace), etc. Companies had different groups and initiatives to focus on these KPIs essentially.
While these improvements were taking place, companies like Apple and Google came in and they have revolutionized industries and some competitors and segments got fully eliminated. Companies who were mostly focusing on incremental stuff got sudden wake up call. Now fortunately or unfortunately there is no confusion on where to focus. Now every business and industry is expected to bring real innovation and not just simple improvements. Technology advancements have eliminated the need for small improvements and called for big innovations.
Some innovation in some industry will trigger some other innovation in some other industry. This is what I call as “Innovation Proliferation”. In Ray Kurtzweil words ““Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion ”.
So the Innovations are happening in non linear way. Both at individual level and companies level the expectation is to deliver cutting edge innovations and not some superficial improvements. Process improvements could be delivered with some slow pace and peace. Innovation is expected at speed with edge. So only few can cope with this combination. Now every company is trying to figure out how to cope up this combination !!. And as part of this new innovation methodologies, frameworks and innovation philosophies are emerging.
Will dwell into these …
YK