Dynamic business – keep up with rapid innovation
In today’s dynamic, fiercely competitive world, the game has completely changed. Even when it appears as if a company is doing everything right, it can still lose its market leadership — or worse, disappear altogether.
This is the worst case scenario for your business, keeping up to date with the latest technologies is important, but creating a lean, agile business can keep you on the top of your market for years to come. Casino Rizk tell us how to keep your business dynamic for today’s competitive market.
The new species of technology disruptor shifts the entire paradigm of what it means to innovate and compete. New businesses and products can rise from total obscurity to complete dominance — creating or destroying entire markets — in a matter of months. Incumbent vendors are dazed, heads spinning, as they struggle to react to unexpected disruption that feels like an earthquake — one that completely changes the topography of the entire market landscape.
Competing and innovating in today’s high-speed cycles of boom and bust requires true business agility. Smart executives — from bootstrapped startups to behemoth tech giants—are now leading product and solution development across an entire continuum, from operations to exploration. We’re all familiar with the operational side of this equation: continuing to support current revenue-generating products and making quarterly numbers. But in our current business environment, taking advantage of market uncertainty by exploring and incubating product innovation is now at the heart of a company’s success.
Today, it’s vital to infuse your business with a dynamic, startup-minded, entrepreneurial focus on discovering what’s new and possible. By infusing Agile and Lean concepts into future-looking product development, companies can actively innovate, create a pipeline of viable opportunities, and thwart disruptions in a technology economy that can move markets in months. This means letting your entrepreneurial-minded visionaries explore, experiment and develop technologies and products in a fairly free-form “innovation sandbox” to sustain future business.
This innovation sandbox provides a safe, contained place where innovators are free to unleash their creativity, play and run ideas through rapid experiments to validate assumptions. Although this sounds like a black box where money goes in and magic comes out the other side, it’s actually a very disciplined process of discovering future opportunities by forming a team innovation sandbox, discovering possible new offers, validating those offers are viable, and then successfully transferring the new offer into the operational side of the company.
The engine of progress in this land of uncertainty is frame, build, measure, learn. This process turns uncertainty into knowledge about what will work in the marketplace.
Developing a minimum viable product (MVP) is a key component for accelerating your learning in this phase. MVPs can be rough, incomplete, and downright buggy, but good enough to provide a valid test of the assumptions behind the product before making a major commitment. Getting feedback on and understanding if potential customers think your MVP actually solves a real problem or enhances their lives, is a vital part of disciplined exploration that offers the best chance to discover, not predict, the future.
Agile and lean innovation requires a change of perspective, one that sometimes breaks the brains of old-school managers who, for decades, have attempted to predict the future with big, up-front annual or multi-year business plans. Instead of attempting to predict the future, agile and lean innovation embraces uncertainty, shifting the concept of planning to one of adaptive steering – making continual adjustments to the business in response to ongoing change. Successfully steering toward innovation entails discovering emerging demand for a new product or service and then figuring out how to capture an engaged customer base.
We can’t slow down the faster boom and bust cycles of business and technology or gaze into our crystal ball to predict what the future will bring. But, we can create a dynamic business to transform how new products are built and launched to adapt and respond to change faster. This offers the best chance to keep pace and compete in today’s complex, competitive technology marketplace – and the greatest shot at becoming the disruptor instead of the disrupted.
