Innovation Is Not the only Way to Success

Innovation: Not the only way to succeed

By

Joshua Witte

MNGT 3380

        “Innovate or die!”, as many people would say after reading the works of Clayton M. Christensen. “Clayton Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches one of the most popular elective classes for second year students, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. He is regarded as one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth and his ideas have been widely used in industries and organizations throughout the world.” (Clayton Christensen , 2016) Clayton Christensen has written many works of the issue of innovation and his most famous work “The Innovator’s Dilemma” has created the belief among many in the business world that innovation is the only way to success and long-life in any industry. The IPhone for Apple created a new era in personal handheld devices and connectivity throughout the world. This innovation also lead Apple to become the largest company to ever exist with a valuation at almost 593 billion dollars. Apple’s innovation certainly paid off and the decisions it made along the way were in the right direction. Enter Samsung, Samsung jumped into the cellphone game knowing that it was a profitable industry. Samsung didn’t need the research and development that Apple did, the uncertainty had already been taken on by Apple and the market proven successful. Samsung rode on Apples’ coattails when it created the Galaxy and billions in new revenue. Which approach was more profitable, which approach was safer, which approach lead to the greatest success, and which approach is most the repeatable? Which company would you rather be, the company that risked millions of dollars on a longshot and will never be able to produce those same results again or the company that put its money on a sure thing and won. This essay will put both approaches in perspective giving both reasons to be the innovator and reasons to be the copycat in a new industry. Is innovation the only true way to become a winning player in the world’s most interesting game of chess, otherwise known as business? Or is the better approach to copy a great idea and add great execute and efficient strategies?  

        “Innovation is the work of knowing rather than doing.” (Drucker, 2002) states Peter F. Drucker with the Harvard Business Review. What is Innovation? The word “Innovation” has become a foundation for which companies have been founded and vision statements are molded. Innovation has become a business strategy where previously profit for shareholders was the focus of a business’s underlying core metric. Innovation has become a word synonymous with success in the business world. Companies that achieve a truly innovative product will succeed or so the prevailing ideas suggest. Innovation is the act of creating a market where there previously wasn’t a market. The Blue Ocean business strategy developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne is the idea that success can be achieved by offering something, a product or service, that no one else does currently. Innovation in its simplest form is doing something for the first time.

Andrew Weinreich founded a truly innovative company in 1997 called SixDegrees.com a social networking site that was the predecessor to all other forms of social media including Facebook and Myspace. Why hasn’t anyone heard of SixDegrees.com, it meets the criteria as a truly innovative company, success should be a given when innovation is achieved. The website saw its last days in 2001 and was forever lost within the depths of the internet. Before the IPhone and IPad there was the GO Corporation a company founded in 1987 that created personal handheld computers with touchscreen displays and pen-based user interfaces. In August 1993 GO Corp. saw its last investor AT&T pull its support and funding allowing the company to die. (Quinn, 1995) What do all these innovative companies have in common that destined them to the graveyard. I believe it was the focus on innovation for innovation sake and the lack of interest in true profits for shareholders that ruined these companies. Some may say that they were before their time but aren’t all innovative companies before “their time”?

It’s possible that innovation may not be the reason that companies like Apple and Facebook were successful but more to do with timing and execution. If the definition of innovation is being the first to do something never done before then both Apple and Facebook are not innovative companies, they would be copycat companies. Apple and Facebook both took an idea that was already established and introduced it at the right time and added the right mix of management and execution to become successful. In 2005 Go Corp. founder Jerry Kaplan sued Microsoft for a patent infringement for using information shown to them under a non-disclosure agreement and won. Further showing that innovation may be the way to failure and ruin rather than success.

A case can be made that the most successful companies in the world are built on copying great ideas. The patent infringement lawsuits are endless in this end of the world of business. Take for example Microsoft’s OneDrive, formally SkyDrive changed due to legal issues, has many copiers such as ICloud, Dropbox and Google Cloud Storage to name a few. As Ndubuisi Ekekwe with the Harvard Business Review puts it “[On innovation] … It is seen as the fulcrum that will propel a business to success. So, firms are encouraged to invest in R&D to outflank competitors with potentially better products that could win markets and generate better margins. The push to the top of the innovation index means that some companies will try to avoid what others have done — even when others are yielding better results.” (Ekekwe, 2012) Results are ignored in the name of innovation and companies that know the true score copy the industries best. The money that is wasted by companies in the pursuit of innovation can often mean the difference between success and failure. Research and development for many companies have become the biggest expense on their balance sheets. The weight of innovation is crushing many companies with respectable chances at success.