By S. Suren
Many companies brand themselves as innovative and want to build a learning and innovative culture within the organisation, whether these are small or large enterprises, all of them tend to strive for the same thing, but what happens eventually is both of them have their own resource problems when it comes to launching the product into the market (time to market).
It is a known fact that any innovative product needs to have the shortest time to market, which means everything else surrounding that product needs to be expedited including its product & project life cycle phases. Examples of some companies who churn out new products on the go are apple, salesforce.com & Virgin.
Most experts would agree that smaller company tend to be more innovative than large ones and typically their time to market would be faster, however this might not necessarily be the case, a few factors, like those listed below tend to show otherwise :
• Shop floor to Shelf time
• Final product’s ecosystem
• Continuity
Shop floor to shelf is the ability to move through the product lifecycle to come out with a base version. Generally smaller companies don’t procrastinate, i.e. they don’t wait until everything is perfect and gone through the various different level of a product life cycle, and they most often have the instinct to go when you feel you are 80% ready. However this could be in their favour or against them.
Final Product’s ecosystem is how best to use the existing business model to sell the new product. Trying to do anything very different if what you are doing presently and which works takes time, because re-inventing the wheel takes time. Large companies tend to try to do something different to satisfy their need to create a new channel to build a business division, a new office block, new designations and what not!! Smaller companies don’t have a choice and go with what they’ve got.
Continuity is the ability to have the resources and systems in place to work on the next version immediately once the first version is out. This is where I feel large companies have the better hand, since they can afford to do this; smaller companies on the other hand generally experience a lag during this time.
Just like as mentioned in growth models (e.g. Greiner’s) in management books, innovativeness tends to die out as companies become larger this is mainly due to red tape, however if the companies can treat each sub unit as business entities with their own entrepreneurs, innovative ideas would come about, most often than not this is practised in only the marketing or development unit of the business, but I feel this can be practised in other areas of the business too.
Most large companies like to believe they have an internal culture to accommodate this innovativeness but deep down they all know that if the simplest of things like a leave approvals takes time it sure is going to take time to launch a new product into the market !!
Hope you found this post informative. Feel free to mail your comments to ssurenlk@msn.com
