Your industry is being disrupted, business is declining, what to do?
A pandemic, a change of customer behaviour, a regulatory change, a disruptive player,… there are many reasons why your industry might be disrupted or the better alternative declining sharply. What is it you do?
The normal approach would be to create a team that is now tasked with coming up with the new cash cow(s). This “super innovation team”, “The A-Team” is the future, the board has decided. Everybody can get back to their day job and wait for them to solve the apocalyptic problem.
So imagine you are leading the A-Team what should you do? Many people when dealing with innovation, think asking the customer is the solution. Let’s go and ask the customer why they think their horse is too slow! The customer will be able to give you reasons but they will not be able to explain that they need an electric car. An electric car with an auto-pilot. An electric car with an auto-pilot which forms part of a robot taxi network. A transport as a service offering in which you subscribe to be moved from point A to point B and where you do not have to worry about parking, washing, charging, maintaining, fixing, insuring,…
So let’s continue our imaginary tale and for some super lucky reason, the A-Team translated the faster horse request into a transport as a service vision which can completely change the future of how billions of people travel. Make parking businesses, car washes, the oil industry, the car sales, car insurance and lots of other industries irrelevant. They now take this big vision to the board and say we have a positive business case, we have validated customers like the solution, all we need are $100B to design an autonomous car, build 10 car factories, create a leading artificial intelligence team,… By the way, the skill of horse breeding is irrelevant so the faster we can get rid of them, the more time we can spend on building our vision of the future.
How likely do you think the A-Team is to succeed? You guessed it. They have no chance at all. So the B-Team is asked to take over. They start working with existing customers and the existing business. They use genetic innovations, machine learning, mobile apps,… The various solutions they come up with are:
- Genetically modified horses with longer legs
- They bought a HorseTech startup, “The UberHorse”. Via a mobile app UberHorse offers a service to swap a tired horse for a new one when travelling long distances.
- …
Every customer is excited. The board is excited. In the next three years the company sees revenues grow and becomes the market leader of genetically modified UberHorses.
At the same time, members of the A-Team got hired by a crazy (rich) Southafrican and put to work on their vision. In three years time the first electric vehicle was launched. It took another 5 years to make it fully autonomous but they finally got there. A bit later than predicted by their visionary CEO. At the end, they did not only disrupt the oil, parking, car insurance,… industry but also the genetically modified UberHorse industry.
Conclusion: If a visionary approach and an evolutionary approach do not work, what else should a company in this situation do? The profit growing innovator to the rescue. Let’s have a conversation.
