Innovation: Making a Better Wheel Without Reinventing It
Written by Deb Dorchak - June 9, 2011 2 Comments
Living in the Information Age has its perks. Everything we want to know or learn is right at our fingertips. Want to be a gourmet chef? Find out online. Want to start a business or create a new product? Learn how to get started online.
Getting started is the easy part. And being on the inside of the business may look easy too — especially when you have the benefit of seeing how others before you did it.
But what works for one, doesn’t necessarily work for all. And sometimes what works for all, ends up being the status quo, which for many people is just not good enough.
What happens when that status quo isn’t working for you?
Enter Innovation
The status quo may serve you well for a little while, but it won’t sustain you over the long haul. It’s a good place to make your initial leap, but if everyone kept doing the same thing everyone else was doing, the world would be pretty darn bland. Vive le difference!
This isn’t to say reinvent the wheel. Far from it. What you want to do is improve on that wheel in such a way it works for you.
Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader
Two innovators I admire most are Walt Disney and George Lucas. Both are years apart, but they have one thing in common. Both were great visionaries who forever changed the film industry.
Walt made cartoons more than something for kids. He turned animation into an art form. George Lucas took special effects to the next level and paved the way for films like Lord of the Rings and Forest Gump.
Both men had their visions and the technology they had on hand just wasn’t good enough. What they needed didn’t exist, either. They were able to take what they had and modify it to fit their needs. They took the action required to make their creative vision a reality. These changes set them apart from their peers and set a new industry standard.
What’s Your Wheel?
Take a look at your business. How do you work? Are you just blindly following what everyone else has done before you? Is it working? Or do you end up spinning your wheels in the mud a lot?
This week, take a close look at how you do things. Think about what you can change to make your services or products stand out, or how you can make them run more smoothly for yourself. The change doesn’t have to be huge. Sometimes the smallest alteration can lead to the biggest groundbreaking discoveries. Who knows? You could be the next George Lucas waiting to bust out.
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2 Outstanding Responses to "Innovation: Making a Better Wheel Without Reinventing It"
Brett Legree on June 9, 2011 at 5:11 pm | Permalink
Many very successful businesses were built upon “improving a wheel” rather than inventing it.
For instance – take an existing product or service, improve it slightly in some way or find a new way to apply it, a new market for it, etc.
That’s the cornerstone of a couple of my businesses, actually. Take something that already exists, change it in some way to make it appealing to a very specific niche that isn’t being serviced – yet – and get in on the ground floor.
Deb Dorchak on June 9, 2011 at 6:11 pm | Permalink
That’s very true. The Japanese especially have been doing this for a very long time. It works to make products more appealing and for improving systems within one’s own business.