Current IT market is saturated with applications, solutions etc. Any new entrant in to such market needs to be ‘a class apart’, if it wants to establish and make an all around impact. There have been numerous questions on what contributes to a startup being successful.
There is a general conception that innovation only happens in R&D (if the company is predominantly looked at as R & D centered company) and the other teams like engineering, business development etc do not come under the umbrella of innovation. While the other teams have a role in the process of taking the innovation from the labs to the market, there is an angle that my friend Karthik and myself were discussing over the week.
It is about ‘Innovation from all quarters‘.
What it means is that innovation should come from all departments in a company- be it business development, sales/marketing, engineering or support. It is a known fact that no company is going to be successful if all pieces of the organization do not contribute to the goal. But where does ‘innovation from all quarters‘ fit in?
For new products which have similar predecessors in the market, the challenge is to gain sizeable market share and make substantial revenue. For this, they have to prove that they are a class apart and not one among the millions of similar products out there.
There is a convincing need to bring in the need for innovation from all departments. The prerequisite for this is that the R&D company should some innovative technology in a common IT space (say for example, content acceleration or video conferencing). Some of our thoughts on how other departments can innovate are as follows:
Engineering / Productization Team: Intuitive features, Effective Software Manifestations,
Business Development: Pricing innovation, Out-of-the-Box positioning, feasibility analysis (from a market projection perspective).
Marketing: Simple and effective ways of marketing the ‘New Kid’ in the block, feature enhancement suggestions based on market research
Here is a graphical illustration of our thoughts in a simple way.
Success in the market for startups will only be guaranteed if the above is implemented for a number of iterations.
This article is just our view from inside out and doesn’t cover every aspect that could contribute to a startup success (by avoiding common mistakes). A quick check on Google for ‘Startup Mistakes’ results in some great articles to read.
If you have any comments, please feel free to do so in the comments section.
Tags: Innovation, startup
Leave a Reply