The Ugly Truth About Innovation and Disruption

The Ugly Truth of Disruption: Substance Over Style for Texas Innovators

In the world of investment and business, literature surrounding Disruption and Innovation often resembles fast food—it promises immediate satisfaction but lacks substance, leaving executives regretting the money spent. The truth is, a business book titled, ’10 steps to a more innovative or disruptive company’ cannot encompass the systemic issues that hinder real innovation.

Yet, every executive strives to find that secret recipe to create a trend-setting company. The innovationCAFE emphasizes that becoming a truly innovative industry leader requires more than superficial changes. Spending money on whiteboards and clear glass conference rooms after a TED seminar is not going to make a company more innovative.

Innovation Requires Investment, Failure, and Repetition

Scholars, including Dr. Clayton Christensen, and experts like Dan Maycock, highlight the fundamental differences between the agile operations of start-ups and the often-rigid structure of large corporations. They agree that true disruption requires a significant commitment:

• Considerable Investment: Innovation demands sustained financial and intellectual backing.
• Multiple Repetitions: It is not a one-time event; it takes repeated effort and a commitment to continuous improvement.

Unfortunately, many companies fall into conformity and efficiency once they have found their initial success. Being innovative more than once must become the core of the business, and a lack of traditional structure must become the new normal.

 

The Core Focus: Bigger than the Product

Dan Maycock stresses that the new focus for innovation must be centered on a trend or an idea that won’t go out of style, rather than the company’s current products and services.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, provides a key example: while many see Amazon as a technology company, Bezos states their focus is fundamentally on selling and shopping. Technology is merely a means to that end.

• It is essential to think of a company as something bigger than the products or services it distributes.
• The business must connect people or transport people, and it must never go out of style regardless of technological, social, and economic changes.

 

The InnovationCAFE Mandate for Texas Executives

To get good at being disruptive, you must fail so that you can grow something bigger, faster, and stronger.

For Texas companies aiming for industry leadership, this means:

1. Constant Survival Mindset: Remaining flexible and in a competitive state of survival.
2. Strategic Flexibility: Focusing on how to bend and flex in new areas while withstanding the types of economic shifts that put 90% of start-ups out of business.

This is the ugly truth most innovation books fail to recognize, but it is critical to staying ahead and is the foundation of the strategies taught at the innovationCAFE workshops in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.

Source: The Ugly Truth about Social Media by Dan Maycock

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