The buzzword is “Innovation.”
It appears like every business enthusiast is running after it, to implement it anyhow, to his / her entrepreneurial setup. And why shouldn’t it be a wild goose chase for innovation?
People (rather customers & clients) are literally bored of either obsolete, similar in appearance or repetitive marketing campaigns. To them, in the crude sense, innovation means anything that appears new. Entrepreneurs of today are focusing on grabbing more and more customers in order to expand their business footprint. Start-ups are sprouting like mushrooms; and everywhere… not just limited to Category – A cities or metropolitan areas anymore. People we haven’t heard of anywhere are now emerging as business leaders, entrepreneurs, job providers/creators and business motivators; REAL diamonds in the rough.
One can get a clear picture of the modern – era business world by merely looking at the stats about the percentage of people entering the working class’s category. And among them, those who are more inclined & interested towards initiating a start-up than opting for a vacancy against any government service. Believe me; the overall count of former is much larger than the latter. Reason – There are not enough job opportunities with the government… that’s it and that’s all!
Innovative Economics: –
If you Google search the word – Economics, you get: –
The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
The question arises, how much innovation can be made to penetrate into production, consumption & transfer of wealth.
Response – Well… it’s unfathomable.
Once you start innovating, you simultaneously start renovating, inventing, transforming, overhauling, rethinking, hypothesizing, experimenting, discovering and a lot more. Economics is something that is a lock with multiple keys, but only one among the bunch taps in to open the lock. While innovating in the existing economics of your business or implementing guidelines of innovative economics to your business setup, the entire struggle is in finding that particular key to unlock untapped potential of business-related prosperity.
The foundation of an Innovative Economics relies on two major blocks: –
- The central goal of economic policy; higher productivity through greater innovation.
- Decreasing the reliability of market on input resources & price signals; not always the reliability is effective to get higher productivity.
Taking the example of an oldie, The New York Times; around 1940s, when television was getting all the attraction in America, it took the charge and came out with this –
“Television will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t timed for it.”
The editorial staff of the NYT innovated its marketing strategy by demeaning the popularity of the TV. Or in other words, the reliability of the input resources for the TV was deliberately decreased in order to avoid the loss in sale of newspapers; that’s planning the economy with disruptive innovation. It’s a real thing nowadays.
Conventional doctrines/theories on Economics are fast growing obsolete in terms of the modern – day market of start-ups. Entrepreneurs working on the old economic practices are either left with too much competition (forcing them to give up & retire early) or highly piled-up liabilities (negative or zero asset formation). Either of these is not favorable for a healthy business growth.
So, Innovative Economics is implemented to give, if not perfect then at least, the best available guidelines to direct a business setup towards a zooming growth. Remember, the present – day market competition is a merciless foe and will not treat you nicely if you don’t stand out tougher.
Role of an Innovative Entrepreneur: –
Entrepreneurs with innovative mindsets are NOT created with different clay. For them, every risk, threat or challenge is an opportunity to think of a new solution to tackle it. They save only the working solutions as ‘future strategies’ and implement them whenever similar threats, risks or challenges surface. These strategies are similar to the immunity – driving cells of a human body. This exhibits their firsthand preparedness and thus the business setups by Innovative Entrepreneurs hardly suffer any crisis on the economic fronts.
The importance of the role of Innovative Entrepreneurs is defined by their characteristics, viz.
- They are torchbearers of Apophenia & Agenticity; while the former is the ability to perceive meaningful patterns within random data, the latter is the tendency to infuse the patterns with meaning and intention.
While ‘random data’ means a pool of problems, ‘patterns’ hold the same meaning as working solutions which later become business strategies.
2. They observe & take note of everything happening around them.
While most of the entrepreneurs become big – headed after establishing their business, the innovative ones always stick to the tiniest of the details available or known.
3. They are smart workers, not hard ones. Innovative Entrepreneurs will NEVER ask you to bury your heads & work like mules. However, they will always expect smart work from your end. Smart work saves time and with that saved time, one can do n number of things.
4. They preach perfection but practice progress. Who does not wish to be perfect? Even Innovative Entrepreneurs do. But, they also know about the hard reality that perfection can be crippling whereas discarding it will open the doors to mediocrity. Neither is acceptable. So, they keep the pendulum swinging between perfection & practice.
An example from the 1980s comes to consideration while discussing the practice to progress. AT&T, a technology and research giant, was in a dilemma over the attempt to retain the frequencies essential for operating mobile phones. So, to clear the mist, they hired America’s best consulting firm to predict/forecast the likely number of American subscribers for mobile phones by 1999. The estimate was made for a million subscribers but R&D and production departments’ innovators had a different opinion altogether. They were pretty sure for the numbers to be in 10s of millions. Surprisingly, by the end of 1999, there were more than 70 million mobile users.
So, their practice to research, develop and produce enhanced their predicting skills as well. In an innovative economy, one has to be, if not accurately, then at least somewhat predictable about the future of the business in which he/she is engaged.
5. They understand the creative process. Planning, Preparation, Execution / Implementation, Analysis & Troubleshooting are the stages of a creative process. Innovative Entrepreneurs spend most of their quota of creativity in the Preparation & Execution phase because qualitative delivery matters the most. They mostly practice mental disengagement to think beyond.
Another example to mention here; during the years after 1960, LASER technology was getting a booming response from the market enthusiasts. But, the production was low and very costly so, this invention was termed useless despite being a scientific breakthrough. As a result, the innovators took the charge once again and provided a variety of new applications for the use of a LASER. Later, it became the primary instrument of research in the chemical industry. Since then, its application has grown to electronics, medical diagnosis, and treatment, surgical procedures, telecommunications, optical fiber communication, etc.
In the case mentioned above, rarest one of its kind, the need wasn’t there, but needs were later created innovatively to give purposes to the invention. Here, the innovators grasped the idea behind following a creative process & implementing it accordingly.
Innovation, Innovative Economics & Innovative Entrepreneurs, when blended together, create a masterpiece as a business entity. Demand is at the peak for all three, grab on to whatever’s available; the supply is negatively disproportionate.
