Towards embracing innovation

A number of African business leaders and entrepreneurs are reluctant and lack conviction towards the pusuit of bold innovative ideas in today’s fast-paced, dynamic business environment. They’d rather cling to ‘buying and selling’. Seldom do they take cognizance of the need for fresh ideas as a fundamental ingredient to obtaining a competitive advantage.

In the century, industry boundaries remained intact, and the competitors were well known and on most occasions, came from within one’s own industry, more or less, rarely did they overlap from other industries.

Furthermore, market leaders set the rules, and used their accumulated unfair advantage to ward off, or even destroy, the competition because product innovation was an advantage that took years for any competitor to emulate. Unfortunately, the golden years when we could milk the cash cow product for years are now far behind us, and it’s now time to embrace the reality that innovation is taking hold in any other industry.

So, just how susceptible are our business models to innovation? Very, actually, and only bold and creative action on our part can avoid it, and make our businesses remain relevant. Most of our businesses are confined to having the simple game plans of being replicators: either sticking with the familiar core business, asking customers what they want, and then make requested improvements or simply keeping pace with their competition’s emerging innovations and the resultant reality in both cases is that neither is doing any thinking for themselves. Most of these businesses create a future that merely amounts to bringing the past forward.

In most instances, African business people fail to design strategies that depend on original thinking, thereby ensuring that their businesses pursue a goal to capitalize on the sales growth, profitability and brand equity benefits created by being first to the market. Trendsetters normally create new marketplace demand, and accelerate the emergence of an unprecedented future. Sustainable competitive advantage goes to companies that discover opportunities no-one else-neither their customers nor their competitors- can ever imagine.

The companies that have done the best over the long haul are those who are the most creative and innovative. These organizations don’t copy what others do; instead, they may use innovative ideas from others as a spring board to come up with a unique application, product, or service for themselves. They tend to distance themselves from the competition rather than compete with them. If they see another company copying what they do, they create something new and better. In other words, they are able to leverage their creativity and their innovative capabilities to attain long-term success.

Would you like to be one of those organizations? You can be. In fact, all companies can be more creative and innovative no matter what their expertise, product, or service. When you apply creativity and innovation to everything aspect of your business, you are able to stay ahead of a changing marketplace and the competition.