If you really want your company to stay on the bleeding edge of innovation, there is something I recommend that you do. You need to create competition within your organization, and you need to have your innovative teams competing against each other. Not only for the best idea, and concept, but also for the best engineering, design, materials, and why stop there? How about the best new customer service procedures, the most efficient office procedures, or the best way to streamline the distribution channels?
Innovative companies are on the leading edge in marketing, branding, products, and the services they offer to their clientele. And they do best when they have their teams challenging each other, in different departments trying to out-innovate themselves. You see, there comes a time when your company is so innovative, and so on the leading edge of everything that you surpass the competition.
At that point you need to look inward and not lose the competitive spirit, if the competition can’t follow you into the future, compete against yourself. That’s what we did, and I am the former franchisor founder of a company that did mobile vehicle washing franchises.
We had our master franchises and each and every franchisee always sending in new ideas each week to see who had the best idea. We offered prizes, rewards, brand-new equipment, and even free marketing teams which would come into the area to help launch the new concept. There wasn’t anyone in the world that could compete with us in our industry, and many tried.
Oh, they try to imitate us as fast as we could produce it, but they could never keep up. And yes, sometimes we crashed and burned on new ideas, sometimes the concept did not take off in the marketplace or were not valued by the customer, and we cut those projects and moved on. We were not afraid to take risks nor we afraid to compete against ourselves to see who was the best.
In the end we found out who was the best, we were, that means each and every one of us was the best in the industry. If you want to win and be innovative, and be the best in your industry, you need to do the same, because as far as I’m concerned, that’s all that really works. Please consider all this.
