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INNOVATION IS OVERRATED | How execution can make up for an average idea | Aj&Smart

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The tech media is obsessed with innovation. Front pages of sites like The Verge, Wired, Techcrunch or Fast Company tell us very clearly what innovation is: great ideas, new ideas, different things and cool things. As a result pragmatic iteration is ignored or even attacked while exciting ‘moonshots’ and 10X leaps are fetishised. 

Does your new product have something really unique about it or is it just a remix or small improvement of something that already exists? The former is likely to garner column inches, the latter may even damage the brand’s reputation. (e.g. The iPhone is always portrayed as something lacking inspiration). Is this a problem? For the average consumer I would argue that it’s not, but for company runners, managers or employees tasked with building and releasing products, it can be misleading or worse, destructive. 

When the media conversation around innovation is heavily weighted toward “flashy, new ideas”, companies especially those older ones currently attempting ‘Digital Transformation’, tend to assign more weight to them. Working on a banking product that will dramatically reduce the friction of creating a new account? Sounds great, but where’s the innovation? You need to give us a story or what do we have to write about?/What would Snapchat do? 

At an industry level, innovation is being defined as “creating things that are 10X better rather than 10% better”, the problem is that this 10X is often focused purely on the idea, the solution rather than the execution of that idea. Remember when the press was completely in love with  the innovative Windows Phone UI. They hailed its arrival as proof that Apple’s iOS was about to become irrelevant. 

Apple’s steady execution of their plan to build a huge developer community created one of the best app ecosystems on any platform and rendered all those cool tile animations pointless. Microsoft couldn’t gain traction with developers. Key apps like instagram never made it to the platform and eventually the entire product was killed off. 

Apple are a perfect example of a company that prioritises execution over ideas. This requires a huge amount confidence in their strategies (steadfastness) and a lot of patience.

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INNOVATION IS OVERRATED | The perfect explanation of Innovation | AJ&Smart