Innovate through Unexpected Events

By Clifford Cui

One of the rich sources of Innovation is unexpected events: unexpected success and failures in your business, and unexpected external events that may impact your business.

Unexpected success means unexpected surges in demand of your product and services. It could be a sudden increase in sales of a product or line of products at your store(s), unexpected orders from new buyers and distributors, requests for your product from a new market segment for a different usage. It should also include the success of your competitors and suppliers. Such surges may temporarily over burden your current system’s capacity, deviate it from your traditional markets or clients, more so, render conflict with your company’s current mission, goals, strategy, and objectives.

Unexpected failure needs a little more clarification as some of it may result from poor product design, planning, and execution of the marketing plans, or sheer human stupidity. Therefore, unexpected failure here only refers to the failures of thoroughly researched, superbly designed, and well executed launches of products or projects.

Unexpected external events are the major events happened outside your business. Typical examples, as such, could be terrorist blowing up airlines, technology breakthroughs, and product or business model innovations by your competitors.

The unexpected events foretell the fundamental changes in your business or your business environment. They may be changes of customer’s perception of your product or service, innovation or technological advancement in other sectors. Customers are still purchasing your product, but they may be buying it for a different value, purpose or reason. If you can find out the driving force behind these changes, and be innovative in modifying your offerings, business model, marketing technique, or expand your capacity to accommodate the new demands, you will pose a strong position for your company in the future market. For instance, oregionally, Craiglist’s intent wasn’t to build a community-information-and-exchange site for all the U.S. Instead, Craig began using e-mail to let his friends know about cool events taking place around San Francisco. In order to meet with the demand for the information later on, Craig evolved the network into the popular Craigslist site of today.

Unfortunately, in too many organizations, unexpected successes are overlooked as temporary aberrations. But the unexpected failures will never go away unnoticed. Instead of finding out what’s behind the failure, management often gets quick to point finger to whom the responsible person is. A classical example of such failure is the Swiss pharmaceutical company. In 1950s, there appeared a growing demand for treating animals with antibiotic medicine. When the Swiss pharmaceutical company approached the manufactures for veterinary use of the antibiotics, the manufactures thought that applying a new antibiotic to the treatment of animals was a “misuse of a noble medicine,” and refused to reformulate it to serve the veterinary markets. In the end, the Swiss veterinary company obtained licenses for veterinary use without any difficulty and at low cost. Nowadays, veterinary medicine has become a very lucrative market.

Unexpected events are ideal sources for true innovative thinkers. For example, with the onset of aircraft hijackings in the 1960s and the 9/11 terrorist attack, many new companies and security products have mushroomed. Companies with the know-how and technology built metal, weapon, or chemical detectors, risk analysis and critical assets protection methodology, inspection and training programs, as well as software for the analysis and site profiling. IBM is also well-known for its ability in riding the tide. While merrily following its five-year business plan, it discovered that Apple was going to introduce the personal computer. Instead of ignoring the event, IBM “tweaked” its business plan a little and introduce a PC of its own, which became the industry leader.

Therefore, companies should always be on the look-out of meaningful unexpected events, and take them seriously. They should not only analyze such occurring, but also go out, look around, and listen, and also establish a system to strategize and develop products to seize the development opportunities. Constantly asking yourself the following questions might be useful for this searching and decision making process:

• What unexpected product success, failures or unexpected external events have you had recently?
• In which geographic areas have you had these unexpected events recently?
• In which market/industry segments have you experienced unexpected events recently?
• What customer segments have provided unexpected success or failures recently?
• What unexpected success or failures have your suppliers had recently?
• What unexpected success or failures have your competitors had recently?
• Which of your technologies has had unexpected success or failures recently?
• What unexpected customer/user groups have bought from you recently?
• What unexpected sources have asked to sample, distribute, or represent your product recently?
• What would the unexpected events mean to your business if you are going to exploited it?
• Where could it lead your company?
• What would you have to do to convert the unexpected events into an opportunity?
• How do you plan to do about them?
  
  
  Clifford Cui
  To contact the author, please email cliffordcui@yahoo.com