Innovation has become a constant in all of our lives. We are operating in a fast-moving industry, often exposed to, and working with, cutting edge technologies. While it is easy to take this for granted, I often think about what innovation gives us and how we nurture it.
According to Wikipedia, innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, in-articulated needs or existing market needs. To become, and remain innovative is a challenge for any company. The revelations about the problems faced by the digital innovation team at the New York Times, with other organisations and platforms benefitting from Times content by repurposing in innovative and interesting ways, show just how hard it can be to alter the culture to ensure innovation success.
Innovation in content alone is no longer enough for organisations like these. They also need to innovate around how that content is curated and create opportunities for transactions around the content.
Innovation is disruption
I strongly believe that to be constantly innovative is also to be disruptive. For organisations looking for inspiration on their innovation journey, Netflix is a good example of a company that constantly innovates. It disrupted how video content was delivered and consumed, and this innovation continues today with a new platform that can predict a show’s popularity based on the recommendation algorithms. This development has the potential to overhaul the content commissioning process channels that do not have this kind of information to hand. The recent US remake of ‘House of Cards’ demonstrated how Netflix was able to commission a costly production with relatively low risk. Netflix analysed more than 2bn hours of monthly user viewing to identify a genre, actors and a director that would appeal. Netflix does not, like most of the broadcast industry, measure success by audience size, instead using its subscription model to analyse people’s choices at a granular level. This is digital disruption at its best and most successful.
Another excellent example is Al Jazeera, whose melding of real time reporting and traditional news sources changed journalism around the Arab Spring significantly altered the political landscape.
So how can other organisations learn lessons from the likes of these? Often this means a cultural shift towards giving individuals more freedom to innovate and explore new ways of working, as well as considering the use of agile technology to enable the speed required to facilitate these changes.
Innovation through technology
Coupling a flexible working environment for digital marketers with modern, agile technology, encourages and fosters innovation, for the following reasons:
● Continuous platform innovation allows marketers to quickly test the latest social media phenomena, new market segment or new idea and if it fails, move on without incurring prohibitive costs.
● By putting the power of the technology in the hands of the marketer they can become more responsive to changing market conditions, more competitive and have a bigger impact on the bottom line.
● New marketing and measurement tools including analytics, merchandising, marketing automation, social and community solutions can be quickly and easily added into the mix and used to their full potential.
● Working in an innovative environment attracts more pioneering team members, who in turn, encourage flexibility and speed of strategic thinking within an organisation.
The new customer, empowered by their own technology and the ability to instantly access information on products, services and prices, is demanding the best of the innovation they see around them, whenever and whatever digital experience they are exposed to. This is creating a previously unprecedented demand for speed of innovation within all organisations.
Innovation in the age of the customer
To differentiate themselves in an increasingly noisy digital marketplace and react quickly to the latest customer requirements, marketers must be able to make use of the latest platforms and technologies without being held back by legacy IT systems that are no longer fit for purpose. To succeed and stay ahead in this new age of the customer requires an organisational shift towards speed and flexibility in strategy and thinking. When marketers influence all processes and technologies it allows speed of innovation to keep pace with market demands. Within the organisations who make this shift towards a more flexible environment, marketers have the ability to engage on the customer’s terms and to innovate around how these interactions take place.
The future that technology affords digital marketers is the power to innovate. I can’t think of a greater asset.
By Maria McCann, Field Marketing Manager at Acquia.com.
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