Innovation is one of the most important key for a successful business. It is important because it may brings many competitive advantages as following,
1. Build a brand new market that no one to compete yet
2. Compete with other businesses in a new way
3. Mobilize a business and make it easier to access by other potential customers
4. Increase productivity tremendously
5. Attract capital to help business to grow
It becomes more and more important nowadays because the internet is changing the entire world. The world is becoming more and more flat, so people that across the ocean can come in to your hometown to compete with you easily without you noticing that. The flat world requires that your businesses have to have more competitive advantages to survive.
Dell was successful because it well solves points of pain compares to many other similar companies. They keenly noticed what the market really wants instead of what they thought the market wants at that time and help their clients to solve their problems by providing the customized low-cost but fully functional computer to corporates and small businesses. They hit the points of pain and win the game.
I think your points are important for an entrepreneur. It is not only creating a new product or service; it’s creating a new way of selling it to customers. I feel it is important for an entrepreneur to always have an innovative and fresh way of thinking. You can build a successful business based on an already established company but change the way you present it to customers or create a new connection between the customer and the product/service which the old company failed to notice because they’ve stopped researching new ways to sell their product/service.
Really like the fact that you pointed out the benefits of being innovative for business.
Also, I agree with you that the development of the internet improves a lot on the transparency of international business, which makes competing in the industry much harder than ever. This leads to a core value or reason of being innovative because one can never win the game without differentiating from his/her competitors, in other words, one cannot survive without competitive advantage in long term.
Very insightful analysis of why innovation brings competitive advantage!
Nice post! Dell was successful because it was not trying to sell the product as much as they could; Dell took the time to identify what customers really needed so it started supplying customized products while the other companies struggled and failed to respond quickly to the new kind of service and supply provided by the company.