Fail Faster

It isn’t enough to be just an innovator anymore, according to best-selling Silicon Valley author Tom Kelly. The challenge is to sprint faster than all other innovators in the race.

I heard Kelly speak at the recent 2010 Retalix Synergy conference. He is an inspiring speaker and author of two best-selling books, “The Art of Innovation” and “The 10 Faces of Innovation.” The books reflect learnings from his company’s experiences as a product designer. His company, Palo Alto-based design firm IDEO, is famous for developing the Palm V and Apple Mouse.
To illustrate his point, Kelly showed a graph tracking Sony and Samsung over the past decade. Samsung starts at the bottom of the chart and steadily rises until it catches and passes Sony in mid-decade. Today, the tracks are far apart and the gap continues to grow.

Kelly notes that while Sony is still a great company and has never stopped innovating, it has lost ground because Samsung has accelerated the pace of innovation.

If I were to guess how high innovation appears on a corporate priority list for most retailers my feeling is it would be somewhere in the middle of a top-10 list. This explains why so many innovators jump ahead of retailers and strip away chunks of their business in such areas as e-commerce, social retailing and mobile apps.
The tendency by retailers to reluctantly adopt innovation was explained by another speaker at the 2010 Retalix Synergy conference, Michael Sansolo, a retail food industry consultant. “We only change when it hurts too much to not change,” noted Sansolo, quoting Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

To many retailers innovation hurts. It’s risky, expensive, unproven and you rarely get it right the first time. But it’s also necessary for survival. Think of Sony.

The best way to view the road to innovation is to follow the advice of Ray Wang, partner at the Altimeter Group, who spoke at the recent Epicor users’ conference, which was attended by RIS editor Adam Blair. Wang said, “Retail companies need to fail faster, and then succeed from there.”

Making smart decisions to seize new opportunities and execute them at the speed of retail are also keys to success. But innovation needs to be raised higher on the retail priority list and its pace accelerated, even if it means failing faster.