Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes, as Fast Company’s list of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies clearly shows. [related]
The tech sector is represented on Fast Company’s list by Microsoft near the top and Apple toward the bottom with a few other names you might know sprinkled among the other 48 honorees. There’s a common thread from #1 to #50 though: simple ideas that have transformed how we live.
The biggest barrier to innovation is the tendency we have as humans to hold on to the familiar and fear the unknown. Instead of wondering what would happen if we do something differently, we instead tend to worry about how we’ll ruin the perfectly good process or product if we tweak it even slightly.
No one wants to be the CEO of the company that rolls out the next New Coke, a new product from a worldwide brand that was roundly mocked and quickly retired in favor of the familiar so-called original Coca-Cola formula that it turns out wasn’t exactly the original anyway, but surely the most popular.
The original Coca-Cola recipe, according to legend, included traces of cocaine—which I’ve heard could be an effective way of fighting the coronavirus. (This just in: I’m told this is not true, nor will drinking bleach thwart the worldwide pandemic’s spread, despite claims to the contrary on social media.)
Most Innovative AV Companies
Innovators don’t worry about being the next New Coke. Instead, they think about being the next Uber, an idea that was sitting in front of us for decades but took someone to figure out a way to turn it into a worldwide phenomenon that now we wonder how we didn’t have only a few years ago.
The most innovative companies also understand that their cultural transformations won’t last forever, which is why the best and most successful ones are thinking about their next innovations before their most recent ones truly take off. Innovation takes time, but clearly they’re worth the effort when they become so widely used.
In the AV realm, we’ve seen and heard a lot of companies claim they were the creators of an innovative new product that was going to transform the industry as a true game-changer. Then we see the product for ourselves at a trade show and realize that might have been marketing hype.
Then we ask when this innovation will be available and the answer is almost invariably, “Three to six months from now,” and we move on and put it out of our minds. The funny thing about innovation is we don’t want to wait for it when we feel like we should have it now.
What are you doing or will you do to provide your customers with true innovation? Do you take any sort of inspiration from the 50 companies on Fast Company’s list or are you happy with the status quo?
