It’s might not sound like the most earth-shattering advice to suggest that constant innovation is one of the ways your business can stay ahead of the competition. But stick with me…
Do things other people don’t do and some customers will prefer your way. They’ll spend their money with you instead of anyone else, and your business will grow.
It’s a great defensive strategy as well. Build a reputation for regular, value-adding innovations and customers are more likely to stick around because they know whatever they are buying today will be even better in a few months’ time.
But innovation is often misunderstood.
Sometimes it’s seen as a dry, academic endeavour, full of systems, processes and extra hurdles for your customers and your people. (“We’ve improved the company expense claim system by adding three extra fields so we can build a reporting dashboard in Microsoft Excel. Hurrah – we’re being so innovative!”)
Other times, the bar for innovation is set far too high. It’s either sending people to the Moon or it isn’t worth anybody’s time. (“If we can’t work out a way to assemble cars without using a single bolt, there’s no point trying anything new in the bolt-manufacturing industry!”)
And there are also businesses where innovation is derided because they think everything worth doing has already been done. (“We don’t want to be accused of copying anyone else, so we’ll just keep doing what we’ve always done.”)
Innovation isn’t what people think it is
Every time you do something other people aren’t doing, you’re being innovative.
Get just a little closer to serving your customers’ needs than most of your industry, you’re moving ahead of the pack.
And, in our often greyed-out, me-too world, you don’t even need to do very much to stand out from the pack.
I used to work in the printing industry, running a business which produced food packaging.
Our innovation was in setting up our business to produce only short-run, fast-turnaround jobs at a time when 99% of the industry spent all their time working out ways to amortise their set-up costs over as long a print run as possible to get the price to the customer down as low as possible.
We were often twice the “market rate”. But, with us, you could have your packaging within 24/48 hours. For customers who needed an extra-fast service, we were much closer to satisfying their needs than almost all of our competitors, so picked up a lot of new business as a result.
We used the same industry-standard machinery as everyone else. The difference was in how we used it.
It was a more expensive way to run a printing business, of course, which is why we charged a higher unit price. But for our customers, given a choice between waiting a month for their packaging at the normal price, or buying from us and getting the packaging they needed in 24/48 hours, sometimes we were the best decision overall.
I’m not underestimating the effort that went into making this work, but if you were familiar with the printing industry, you could wander around our factory, see a couple of Komoris, a Roland or two and some Bobst cut and crease machinery Exactly like you’d see in any other firm in our sector.
We didn’t reinvent the art and science of lithographic printing. We just did what we did in a way that most of the industry didn’t, and added £millions to our revenue line in the process.
It’s often the tiny changes
When it comes to innovation, I’ve often found that the real game-changers aren’t huge mega-projects, which risks millions and takes years to come to fruition.
They’re often just the result of a switch in mindset. A different philosophy. An insight most of your industry missed. Distinctive positioning in a grey, same ol’, same ol’ world.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to spot an opportunity and make the switch.
My favourite example of this is the song “Always On My Mind”.
Depending on their age, a Brit is most likely to think of either Elvis Presley’s version of that song or The Pet Shop Boys’.
If you’re from the US, or have exceptionally good taste, you might think of Willie Nelson’s version too.
But for now, let’s keep it down to the first two options.
Apart from one tiny musical flourish (Wikipedia tells me that’s called a harmonic variation, but I’m not musical enough to vouch for that), the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “Always On My Mind” is identical to Elvis Presley’s.
Yes, the Pet Shop Boys used electronic instruments and Elvis used proper musicians, but it’s exactly the same tune, that tiny musical flourish apart.
In the UK, Elvis just squeezed into the Top 10 with his version in early 1973, topping out with a single week at Number 9 in the charts.
In December 1987, The Pet Shop Boys started a 4 week run at Number One in the charts, famously keeping The Pogues’ classic “Fairytale Of New York” off the Christmas Number One spot.
I wouldn’t particularly describe The Pet Shop Boys’ use of electronic instruments as an innovation. People playing the same tune on different instruments has been around for as long as musical instruments have existed.
So the only real innovation was dropping in that extra handful of notes.
Given that everything else was identical, it could be argued that this tiny innovation made the difference which took “Always On My Mind” from a so-so chart performance (by the standards of a legendary artist like Elvis Presley) to a blockbuster Number One single.
Now, don’t take this too literally. Sometimes when I talk about this example, people tell me that by 1987 Elvis had been forgotten and the Pet Shop Boys were riding high in popular culture, so it was easy for them to have a Number One single. Or they bring up other reasons why the results were so different.
But that misses the point. One tiny change meant a huge difference to the results.
It wasn’t a straight copy. The Pet Shop Boys did something different and made their version of “Always On My Mind” distinctively theirs.
Here’s the irony
But this story gets better. Here’s the irony.
I don’t think even Neil Tennant, lead vocalist of The Pet Shop Boys, would claim he’s a better singer than Elvis Presley. There’s no comparison between the quality of their singing voices.
Neil Tennant sings a lot better than I do, so I’m not being snide here. But he’s no Elvis.
So The Pet Shop Boys took a song, made a tiny innovation, added vocals which, by any measure, were objectively worse than the ones Elvis had laid down originally, and they still had four weeks at Number One vs a solitary week at Number 9.
Which also illustrates that you don’t need to make everything better to innovate.
Sometimes you might deliberately choose to make some elements worse. And that’s OK too if your customers don’t much care about those bits, as long as the elements you add in deliver even more value than whatever value you take away.
You might agree or disagree with their choice, but the record buyers of 1987 knew a good song when they heard one, and made that choice.
Now even more irony
The extra irony neither Elvis Presley nor The Pet Shop Boys produced objectively the best vocal performance of “Always On My Mind”.
Willie Nelson won a Grammy for vocal performance on his 1982 recording of the song.
He also innovated in his own way, helping this song’s journey from so-so chart performer to multiple Grammy Award winner.
From the full-on vocals and sweeping orchestration of Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson pared the song right back. It was little more than him standing in front of a microphone, strumming a guitar.
Elvis Presley’s voice was, of course, technically impressive.
But Willie Nelson’s version conveys the emotions better. His version hits me much harder in the gut than the other two versions, much as I enjoy them both for their respective qualities.
So what’s the point?
So what’s the point of all this rambling, you might ask.
It’s this.
Innovation can be about tiny changes. It doesn’t need to be “changing the universe as we know it” stuff.
In many organisations, change is a scary thing. Innovation is something people try to avoid. They perceive a degree of safety and certainty in the current model which, whilst a seductively comforting lie to believe, just isn’t true.
Your organisation is at much greater risk from not innovating at all than it is from trying a few innovations for size to see where they get you, because your competitors are more likely to sweep past the longer you stay in the same spot.
Often “innovation” is seen as “a big thing”. Something that will take years and cost millions. But that’s not true.
You can take something thousands of people in your industry have already done, make a tiny change to the way they do it, and have a smash hit on your hands.
You don’t need to believe me. Just ask The Pet Shop Boys.
In this era of tech-endowed AI-faux creativity, let me also play tribute to the original writers of “Always On My Mind” – Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher, and Mark James – without whom I literally could not have written this article.
Between them, they wrote a song that stood the test of time.
Getting on for 60 years after its first recording, “Always On My Mind” is still a song that just about everyone in the world knows. It achieved Gold and Platinum Record status around the world, and Grammy Awards by the bucketload.
How many of us can claim that one of our innovations has reached a comparable level of results…?
Alastair Thomson
Bottom-line focused CFO, CEO and Chairman
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.