Steve Jobs always said, “Innovation is what distinguishes a leader and followers.”
Google results show 24,780,000 results when you search “why to innovate.” Innovation is the primary skill when it comes to business expansion. Innovative people are also known for their predicting skills as they can assess future trends, consumer growing needs, and develop a product to create a demand and fulfill the same.
The innovation cycles are shorter, owing to the smart competition in the market today. However, businesses are willing to put all the efforts to launch a product that can disrupt the market. By rapidly and continually innovating so that they become the one to lead rather than copy the idea from the competitor.
With globalized access to small and large businesses, the need to innovate is critical. This opens up new markets and therefore brings new and more customers for the companies.
It is an innovation that leads Jio to cut down the costs of the 4G data, improving the quality of internet connectivity, and bringing the highest level of satisfaction to the users. This gave Jio a significant advantage over other telecom companies by acquiring 16 million subscribers and touching the mark of 130 million subscribers in Oct 2017.
A recent collaboration between Jio and Facebook shows how a platform like Whatsapp can be made into a revenue-generating platform for grocery stores and Kiranas by delivering their product to nearby homes. Whatsapp has more than 400 million users in India, thus allowing Jiomart, a Reliance’s product, to promote its retail services to this vast customer base. This is definitely going to give Jio users leverage over other telecom competitors.
During the pandemic, innovative partnership in FMCG companies became the new strategy to provide doorstep delivery to the customers. The fear of covid-19 has restricted consumers to homes, limiting their presence to an offline store. Thus, FMCG companies are taking an interest in tie-ups for door delivery. Such tie-ups are a win-win situation for both the partners as it improves sales and generates additional revenue stream through the e-commerce channel.
One of the best collaborations is when the Kolkata based ITC, joined hands with Swiggy and Zomato to deliver its 5-star hotel food along with FMCG products like Sufeast, Yippe, Aashirvaad, Fiama, and Salvon. ITC also started its home delivery for laundry and dry wash services to the customers. It created a win-win situation where the customers can enjoy the 5-star services from home as ITC promises to prioritize sanitation and hygiene.
These examples show how companies should come up with innovative solutions keeping the nuances in mind to achieve the business target. With the growing theme, “Be vocal for your local,” digital platforms are an added advantage to reach consumers overseas. Unlike traditional marketing, which is limited to a certain radius, digital presence helps you expand your presence across the globe, competing with global brands. Still, all this successful endeavor requires innovation and creativity that makes the business different from the competitors, thus acquiring customers and building a global brand.
In the past years, we have seen how companies that failed to innovate make them limp behind the competitors and consequently vanish from the market. Unwillingness to change the mindset or adapt changes lead to arrogance and fear the change. This leads to growth stagnation, and keeping away from a fresh mindset is dangerous, which ultimately makes such businesses fall off the market ladder.
Yahoo failed while Google thrived is because of one significant aspect i.e., innovating and fuelling its search engine. Yahoo missed substantial opportunities, one of them being joining hands with Mark Zuckerberg in 2006, while Google saw the rise of social networks. Google continued to secure its platform while Yahoo disclosed a hacking of the platform in 2016 that compromised about 500 million users.
For a long time, Nokia ruled the mobile phone market, accounting for about 40% share in the market. However, it failed to acquire the touch screen market as it was resistant to change the hardware design while the iPhone was on the rise. On the other hand, Samsung adapted to these changes and thrived, and Nokia failed miserably.
Apple and Android were gaining the market share due to its easy UI while Nokia trusted windows and miserably failed. While the iPhone continued to launch its series every year in September, creating customer acquisition, Nokia was unable to create an umbrella branding.
Sometimes, failure to collaborate and grow can be the biggest blunder, and both Nokia and Yahoo have proved us. With pandemic, all the businesses have enough time to innovate and become creative. Otherwise, they may fail to exist.
Many companies continue to exist after the most extensive lockdown of all the times is because they continued to innovate and live. Zoom platform is one such example that had subscribed to a million users in a month owing to its video conferencing and webinar feature. If a business doesn’t adapt changes with times, it may soon perish, and the name will be forgotten even faster.
So, every business must innovate and leverage the digital platforms to penetrate the global markets based on the target audience and changing consumer trends. Having an online presence through social media platform is always a plus but also keep a check on what is your competitor doing. This is what Samsung did while innovating the smartphones and releasing its “N” series.