The Best Source of Growth is Innovation

The pressure to produce growth quarter to quarter however often outstrips the creative abilities of the inhouse and agency teams to innovate andor expand the user base Some innovations take longer to develop than a quarter And the nature of large businesses with the silos created like shells to hide in so as to maintain the highest degree of undisturbed autonomy and political safety are not of ideal design for innovation because crossdisciplinary interfertilization becomes virtually impossibleTherefore to maintain the semblance of quarter to quarter growth the expedient becomes the fight to take away market share from competitors This dictates that one company39s growth will be another company39s shrinkage Were we able to innovate more effectively and continuously we could all grow rather than half of us growing and the other half shrinkingAnd innovations being by definition the introduction of something new bring new customers and so growth in new customers goes hand in hand with innovation If we could only carry out Drucker39s advice we could sustain growth and it would not necessarily be at anyone else39s expenseJack Myers recently stated that we should spend less time competing and more time cooperating to enlarge our whole sector Which reminded me of something and so I looked it up and checked Yes I found I had recollected correctly Arthur C Nielsen had invented the concept of brand share in 1935 The idea of brands had been around for 4000 years going back to the branding of cattle in India and after WWII the idea of a brand began to expand to contain the idea of a brand as a personality a friend a promise a claim an aggregation of experiential associations and attributes in the mind and feelingsBut brand share was itself an innovation It helped Nielsen and his sales force to explain to marketer prospects the need for Nielsen39s services when they said quotWe already know what our sales numbers arequotToday brand share has become even more important because of the demand for quarter to quarter growth If not enough of it is coming from innovation then it must come from quotstealing sharequot from competitors In a conceivable world where innovation is not so hard to come by growth would be coming from new products and mature products would not be under the unrealistic pressure they are now under to grow forever without limitsIf companies want real longterm solutions to their business challenges and to those of society on which business depends and vice versa they will prioritize innovation in a way that is totally centered on the needs and desires of current and prospective customers They will appoint innovation leaders and allow them to cross silos to create collaboration excellenceCreative research and other agencies are also a vital resource for innovation Big Ideas for product innovation to Bob Schmetterer are the most important function of agencies and yet that function has been hard to spot lately Research is obviously valuable for new product innovation and when I started at Grey a long time ago we regularly did new product tests for PampampG and other clients Lately most quotinnovationsquot are obvious line extensions and the quotresearchquot is all too often just focus groupsResearching innovations is hard because respondents can39t picture what you are talking about if it39s truly innovative Yet as consultant to Arbitron in the 1970s we surveyed people about quotNew Electronic Mediaquot subjects including Smart TVs there were none yet that would suggest to you what to watch and 76 of respondents said they wanted thatIn most cases surveys about new products are flawed because of verbal bias and consciousness bias Almost all surveys are verbally based therefore eliciting comprehension and response from a small minority of brain cells Moreover almost all research is limited to the 5 of the brain involved in consciousness except counting of events at a census level eg store audits set top box data digital clickstream data frequent shopper cards car registrations prescription fills etcThe legitimate research quest for measuring the subconscious typically roams in the direction of visual rather than verbal stimuli neuro and biometric observation ethnographic observation and the intuitive theories of visionary psychologists and other quotsocialquot scientists My own journey uses naturallyoccurring quotcounting dataquot at scale masked individual household set top box data masked individual browser data to detect patterns which can be coded by psychological variables All of these methods used together with creativity and collaboration excellence will enable true innovation in the future to be much more of a regular occurrenceThis applies to all spheres of life including politicsgovernance and the voluntary sector as well as business The application of creativity techniques began within spiritual orders millennia ago and became widespread at agencies after WWII There were not many books on the subject when my own came out in 1976 Mind Magic also sold under the title Freeing Creative Effectiveness and today such books abound not to mention podcasts TED videos and more Most larger businesses and other institutions by not paying enough attention to any of the quotcreatechquot have become less and less innovative allowing brand new creative garage startups to balloon into their own new oligopoly as if out of nowhere as if overnight Political leaders seem incapable of fresh ideas They are not criticized much for this so low are our expectations in terms of people acting innovativelyThis has got to change And it will change It is already changing The hat and banner it currently wears is quotdigitalquot and lately quotAIquot But the refocus on innovation needs to umbrella over everything if we are to survive and thrive as a species and as individualsClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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