Everybody in this day of age is trying to create the next big thing that nobody has thought of. It’s worked wonders for companies like Apple and Amazon but the fact of the matter is that the great majority of innovations fail. A study by the Harvard Business School found that up to 90% of all innovations fail. If there is such a high failure rate, then why is it so alluring to come out with an innovative product or service? or the glory! It is very tempting for businesses to try to innovate because they see the innovation success stories but none of the failures. There is one solution to this problem that needs to be recognized and that is that being a fast follower is a much more successful way of doing business.
A fast follower is a company who quickly imitates the innovations of its competitors by collecting research and data. By figuring out the innovations that seem to have the greatest potential, companies are able to weed out the “duds.” Here is one example. Many people consider Google to be the innovator of the pay-per-click search engine. This is false. The company Overture came out with this idea two years before Google launched its superior version. By learning what Overture was doing right, Google was able to spend more time on what they could do better. This learning process is one of the main components of the fast follower benefit. It’s the idea that the larger companies should let the smaller companies come up with great ideas so they can steal the idea and do it better.
In the world of marketing, successful campaigns that are the only ones of their kind are hard to find because marketers are quick to hop on the bandwagon. By modeling your marketing plan after another that has been successful in the same industry, it removes the risk of marketing failure because you have a better idea of how the audience will respond.
Not convinced? Here are just a few of the benefits you will reap by being a fast follower:
1. Minimizing the cost of market and technological research
2. Being able to understand customer problems and the product features that solve those problems
3. Less risk of failure
4. No need to educate customers about the product because innovators have already done so
5. Able to learn from first to market company’s mistakes
This isn’t exclusive to large businesses either. Smaller businesses can reap the benefits of being a fast follower as well. By being able to examine what innovations are successful, they are able to minimize costs associated with innovative failures. Companies that fail at innovation tend to take serious financial hits all the way to having to shut down the business. Take the Dotcom bubble. There was an appeal to this new technology and everybody wanted a piece of the pie. When the vast majority of Dotcom companies went under, nearly $5 trillion dollars in market value was lost. If more companies use this disaster as an example of what not to do, there wouldn’t be so much buzz around being an innovator.