Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

THE INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATION 347
complacency usually wins the day. Why change if the current
business is generating growth and profi ts? Why not instead
invest in a sure thing to make the costs even lower and the profits
even higher? It is much easier to change when there is a crisis,
although in a crisis both resources and time may be in short supply.
Crisis conditions enabled the Chrysler minivan to live and
the Walmart environmental initiative to happen. In the absence
of a real crisis, an artifi cial one can sometimes be created, as
the CEO of Toyota did when he mandated that the Prius be
designed in two years.
Another is the “ competing story curse. ” Nearly every executive
in the organization will have a list of investments that are
worthwhile, even indispensable, for his or her silo business.
Many if not most will represent incremental innovations. A proposed
new offering, particularly a game changer, will compete
for those resources. An array of political forces can line up
against commitment to a project that would draw resources away
from the alternatives especially if the new offering involves a
different culture, market, or operations.
These three curses just described are all magnifi ed by the
pressure to create short - term growth and margins, in part driven
by the desire for stock returns and in part driven by managers
with short job tenures. Short - term results can best be obtained
by diverting R & D funds to supporting strategic growth to efforts
to enhance the core businesses by improving the attractiveness
and performance of the offering and increasing effi ciency
and productivity. Creating a new business platform is risky and
expensive and likely to result in a short - term fi nancial pain.
Venture Capital
To determine support for innovation in a fi rm, follow the money.
In most cases, existing core businesses have the power, are generating
the current profi ts, and get to use those profi ts to support
their incremental innovation agenda even while starving