Not All That Is New Is 'Innovation'

As markets get tougher, consumers get jaded and success stories rest around new age technology and technology integrated business models, one keeps hearing about the 'need to innovate'.

Having worked, all through, in Industries where the product solution is hundreds of years old (lead acid storage batteries to cement) and pushing teams and self to generate customer value, I have either been preached upon to innovate or have had to preach to sell an innovative idea.

All that is new is not necessarily innovative. Innovation is not about tweaking your product and service to increase sales. It is about empowering your consumer. Some essential questions to raise are, what does the new product or solution do for the customer.

Does it make the customer :-

Empowered to handle a situation with improved speed or quality

Empowered to take a better decision

Empowered to seek a better price or extract better value, in turn, from his customer

Realize, logically, how it improves his quality of life or brings him peace of mind

Pushing ideas through such a sieve of questions improves the robustness of the innovation process. While an ideal innovation story should begin with how a customer need was captured and a product or service solution emerged, in reality it is not always a chronological, step-by-step process. In reality, bright ideas are thrown up from many corners of the organisation. Validating an intuition or gut is a good start to encouraging innovation. 

Observation and listening are important elements in this process. While apparently sounding simple, this is probably the most complex part of the construct. If your systems are only about catching consumer need through formal customer discovery and research processes, you may end up with only those needs recognised through comparative evaluation of yours v/s competitions' offers. Ideas, therefore, need to be encouraged from many quarters. 

A customer facing field officer, many a times, captures needs but is not able to see the potential for development. It is very useful for the top management, from different streams, to make periodic market visits and capture these needs in conversation with the officers. In the peak power crisis times of the early 90's, in a previous battery manufacturing company, our insight was that customers staying in compact apartments had to keep their invertors and batteries in their drawing rooms. Batteries, then, were mere functional items designed by engineers to deliver efficient power. This organisation worked on the aesthetics and positioned their batteries as objects to put on display with pride. It enabled the customer to do away with an elaborate cabinet to store the system, delivering safety and cost savings.

Studying the category, might provide some important pointers. About a decade back, my current company, a cement major tested the hypothesis that an individual building his home and viewing it as a once in a lifetime project would be willing to pay a premium for the cement. Logical, as he was ready to invest in designer tiles, branded bathroom accessories and kitchen cabinets and surfaces. This triggered a survey to establish specifics about expectations from the cement. The insight - a consumer would like to leave the house unpainted till the first rains, to identify seepage points, if any. This provided a dual opportunity to design a product with assurance of void free bonding as well as a smooth and white external finish, that did not require an immediate coat of paint. Providing genuine value addition, to date this product remains best in class.

A recent debate in our organisation was whether driving innovation as a core value, we could build processes that encourage a new way of doing things across the organisation. And, also, whether this was sufficient to be recognised as an innovating organisation. While, encouraging new ways of streamlining operations, generating cost savings, driving collaboration and improving people skills is necessary, it is not sufficient. 

To be recognized as an innovating organisation, three essential requirements are : quantifiable customer value addition, significant time or cost advantage over competition and a demonstrated intent to improve on offers in regular frequency.