The Building Blocks of innovaTion Sussex Innovation CEO Nigel Lambe explores what innovation really means, and what we can learn from successful past innovation strategies 2020 was a unique year in all of our lives and also in the evolution of every business enterprise. There was not a single organisation that will not have had to adapt, evolve and innovate to cope with a world that was never previously envisaged. Most enterprises have had to adapt and innovate in three key areas; their products or services, their business processes, and in many cases, their fundamental business models. They have needed to react in order to accommodate the restrictions placed upon us all, whether in response to the specific
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Covid-19 regulations placed upon their industry, or to the changes of customers’ demands or desires brought on by the immense changes in everyday life. At Sussex Innovation, we understand that having a clear innovation process is critical to the success of any innovation initiative. However, we are also clear that selecting the best innovation process for a given problem is always situational. Up until the mid-1990s British Airways and virgin Airlines were brilliant innovators, continually outdoing each
other to improve the quality of their services and on-board experience. However, it wasn’t until Ryanair and easyJet (copying the innovations of Southwest Airlines) pursued a lowcost model, that the bigger operators realised they had been innovating down a path that the consumer didn’t particularly care for – and certainly weren’t willing to pay for any longer. They did manage to survive that industry transformation - unlike the computer industry, where every generational change in computer technology led to the almost total annihilation of every single incumbent producer. It is an astonishing fact that as technology moved from mainframes to minis and minis to PCs in the early years of the computer industry, truly innovative companies had a 100% failure rate in trying to repeat that successful innovation into the next generation of technology. In innovation, context is everything.
