Futuring and Innovation II

Circumstances beyond our control 

Business adaptivity is the most crucial strategic forecasting in any organization. Failure to adapt to the future of technology, market change, and competitor innovations can lead the organization to a total disaster sooner or later. For example, Blockbuster in movies, Enron in energy and infrastructure systems, Blackberry in the wireless systems, Kodak in the imaging industry, Pan-am in aerospace, MySpace in social media networking, Yahoo in internet email and web providers, Polaroid in the camera industry, and Xerox in copy systems are the giant corporations that failed to adapt.

Each of the above corporations failed because of a new idea with new technology and a new business model, in which they could not compete anymore. For example, myspace was really the most prominent place for people to socialize over time, but Facebook came to market simply with a better user experience. See, the adaptation for MySpace seems so little -- user experience --, but it took MySpace down to death forever. Now, we are talking about adaptation and transformation and the consequences.

Around 2011, our company (CWS, a software development company in LA) asked our team to develop a facetime application with a Blackberry cell phone. We started analyzing and developing the application. In 6 months, after spending lots of time, expenses, and excitement, we reached our proof of concept; when exactly did Apple release the first version of their iPhone internal application of Facetime. In our last management meeting, we put our application on forever sleep, and it was a big failure for our company.

Our company did not learn from the loss. Still, a year after that failure, they decided to develop a comment system as an individual module that could be embedded into any website for their social discussion boards. Our social discussion board was successfully developed, and some customers purchased and used that software, but soon Facebook came up with its free comment system. We retired that software also. 

Forces that may affect your innovation idea

 

Supply and technology is the leading force for innovative ideas, from my point of view. As I described above from my own experiences, technology and supply are getting more sophisticated every day, and tracking this speed is out of the ability of many organizations. This ability is combined with the massive amount of money, credit, and budget these top-level corporations own. They can change any game anytime by releasing as much as free to use. So, how can others even spend money to start thinking and researching. They monopolized all lines of technologies to innovations, to anything at all.

The second significant force against innovations could be legality and many bureaucracies. Innovators must be careful about all restrictions, regulations, and privacy protections necessary but complicated and expensive to follow.

Reference

OECD (2019), "Measuring external factors influencing innovation in firms", in Oslo Manual 2018: Guidelines for Collecting, Reporting and Using Data on Innovation, 4th Edition, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264304604-10-en. 

USNews. (2010, August 19). Access Denied. Usnews.Com. Retrieved 2022, from https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/08/19/10-great-companies-that-lost-their-edge