Does innovation always have to be about BIG ideas or never-before-tried ones? No, of course not.
Not all of us are blessed with the insight to create equations like:
e = Mc**2 .
But here are three relatively minor insights that added enormous value to their respective enterprises:
a) Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonalds, taught his employees to famously ask: “Do you want fries with that?” Who knows if Ray invented the concept of upselling but he sure made good use of it to create a globe-spanning business.
b) Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, saved his business by adding one question to the website: “Would you like to see what other people who bought this book (CD, DVD, etc.) also bought?”* This use of Amazon’s gigantic relational data base meant that instead of perhaps selling one book to a customer, they had a shot at selling two or three. If you are having a minimum wage slave going into a large warehouse to pick a single item, imagine how Amazon’s bottom line is changed when he or she picks and then ships two, three or more items at a time.
c) Ralph Shaw, Founder of Partners Advantage GMAC Real Estate, is creating a Brokerage that is one of the few that does both commercial and residential real estate. He is teaching his agents to ask: “Is there anything else we can help you with?” after completing a transaction or a listing presentation. You might be surprised at how many residential clients need help with a commercial lease for example or how many commercial clients need help selling or buying a home.
Innovation is where you find it. Often, great innovations flow from contact with the marketplace—contact with clients and customers. That is one of the reasons why I always want the folks I mentor to find pre-launch clients, you can learn so much from them. Innovation is everywhere—you just have to be open to new ideas wherever they come from. The Japanese believe in constant improvement. Small things do make a difference.
Now once you have stumbled upon your next great idea on how to improve and innovate within your industry, remember that innovation and good ideas without excellent execution are practically useless.
Dr. Bruce
* Amazon’s relational data base has another cool application—for researchers, you can put in a book you are reading and see what other people who ordered this book are also reading. A lot of smart people use Amazon and it is a simple way to add to your bibliography whether you are a researcher or student writing an essay. For example, I recently read Nassim Nichoas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan. Taleb makes a convincing case that unlikely events (such as the recent economic meltdown) in areas such as economics, weather forecasting, science and tech, are actually far more common than typical statistical models (based on bell curves) would suggest. I tend to believe this from my experience as an entrepreneur. Bell curves might work well for distributions such as height or weight in human populations but don’t fit the data well in many other areas. Surprises, good and bad ones, are surprisingly frequent in many other fields of endeavour. Here is what Amazon suggests others who bought Taleb’s book also bought: The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds… by Richard Bookstaber, The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith, When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres. These are just some of the Amazon results. There are 17 pages of results! Enough to round out any bibliography! This is a free ‘service’ by the way. Just put in the name of a book and you get the suggestions from Amazon.