By Apratim Ghosh
17th April, 2024
Last year, Google officially bid goodbye to the futuristic Google Glasses launched in 2013.
It failed because of its clunky design, high cost, and customers’ concerns about data breaches and hacking.
Amazon’s Fire Phone met a similar fate. The company launched the smartphone in 2014. However, it never gained popularity because of its bulky design, limited apps compared to Android and Apple, and unaffordable prices.
Both products failed because the companies did not fully understand the market and customer needs. Amazon, for example, underestimated the popularity of Google Play Store, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail. Customers could not access these popular apps, which became one of the main reasons for Fire Phone’s downfall.
Like Amazon and Google, many companies fail to see their innovations succeed. According to Harvard Business School, that number could be between 70% to 90%.
Failure in innovation could happen due to various reasons:
Luckily, it doesn’t have to always be this way.
Innovation is not an impossible goal to achieve. At Inovar Tech, we call it the Art of Possible. It opens up a world of new possibilities for experimentation and growth.
To succeed, companies need a practical approach to building innovative products.
Let me explain how it works.
Art of Possible – Bringing Practicality in Innovation
To build innovative products, companies must focus on solving real-world problems rather than building to demonstrate an innovative mindset.
This approach is called practical innovation.
Practical innovation is not just about developing new ideas. It is about turning those ideas into products that deliver tangible results. Innovation and practicality cannot function in silos.
Practicality has to be baked into every step of innovation.
Here are some ways to do it.
Do thorough research to understand the pain points of the customers. This will help you find solutions that will alleviate the customer’s problems.
Don’t rely on a single approach to solve problems. For example, companies use a single tech stack to build products. A single tech stack could hinder innovation if it has limited features and does not evolve with time.
Use a multi-pronged approach to consider multiple approaches to a problem. For example, multiple tech stacks provide more features and flexibility, making innovation easy.
There may not always be a correct answer, but a multi-pronged approach eliminates the assumption that there’s only one way to solve a problem. It encourages companies to find more solutions to solve problems and innovate.
Too much focus on creativity and innovation can pose several challenges. For example, complex interfaces and confusing navigation can lead to customer churn. Impractical products with no real-world use case can lead to wasted company resources and reputation damage.
Find a balance between practicality and creativity to overcome these challenges. Define a clear goal, find multiple ways to achieve it, and choose the best solution after a thorough feasibility evaluation.
Create detailed customer personas to understand the customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. Build products and features keeping these insights in mind. Once the product is ready, launch it to the most avid users for feedback. Conduct usability tests and customer surveys and seek reviews to identify areas of improvement. Implement their inputs to improve the product.
Don’t get distracted from the objective of building a practical product by including all shiny features. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with critical features and functionalities that solve real-world problems. Release it to the users to gather feedback and improve the product. This approach will accelerate the development cycle and save time on building products nobody wants.
Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and measure the metrics regularly. This will help you identify areas for improvement and iterate the product to achieve the business goals. Regular iterations will help keep pace with customer demands and stay innovative.
You must also collect feedback from customers and other stakeholders about the product, analyze it, and integrate the key takeaways to improve it.
How To Decode The ‘Art of Possible’?
In a fast-paced business environment, balancing innovation and practicality can become challenging.
At Inovar, we understand this challenge well. That’s why we conduct workshops called the ‘Art of Possible’ to accelerate a company’s journey toward becoming a digital business.
In this workshop, we will walk you through our 4I framework: Inspire, Ideate, Innovate, and Integrate.
In other words, through this workshop, we help you:
From discovery to understanding challenges and conceptualizing innovative solutions, we will be with you throughout the process so that you can learn the impossible art of achieving practical innovation.
To know more about our Art of Possible, contact us.
