Orange Boat in a Blue Ocean
How did business change over the last decades? What makes a successfull entrepeneur today? Read our insights below.
Some 20 years ago every businessman wanted to be the best at doing this or that. They'd create a product or service and stick with it for many years. The initial success would blind them to the changing trends and market evolution. After some years, and with an ever growing competitiveness, the mainstream thinking was how they could do better than all others.
Today we live in an era where, more than doing better, we need to do different from the crowd in order to run and grow a well-establisehd business. This is why words like innovation and interapreneurship have gained so much buzz.
Selling the same stuff year after year is a business model undergoing extiction. As a consequence, products and services development is a "must have" in every company.
Look around you. All successful businesses and people rely on their strategy in a positive and Orange Boat relevant differenciation. Kodak was the best company producing photographic film. Great. But, who need photo film these days? Apple doubled its sales in one year after launching the iPod, breaking up with 20 more years of focus on PCs.
No, it's not easy upgrading your product and services, nor creating new ones. Staying different from the competitors, without changing image and feelings that people outside the company hold towards it. It's risky. You need to invest and deal with problems along the way. You need some outside the box thinking and probably de-allocate some resources from your successful products.
Business is all about that: create or upgrade something that's missing, to provide the the world. When you stop this, you stop growth and enter a peaceful, yet survival only situation.