Innovation in the digital age

So, how important is innovation these days to a company anyway? Can you survive just by actively copying what competitors are doing successfully or should you try to "strike gold" on your own?

Well, innovation used to achieve market dominance is as important as it has ever been. The problems with innovative products and software are that they’re not available to people in a way that sells. Mp3 players existed before iPods but it was Apple that made the product user-friendly with the product itself and with the iTunes store. Same thing happened with touch-screens, which weren’t so successful until Apple’s launch of the iPhone. To come up with a “kick-ass” technology or software isn’t enough (Friendster à Facebook), the finished product has to be presented and made available in a way that is easy and desirable to the consumers.  

Companies are changing their approach to innovation by involving the consumers and experts outside the company more and more in the process. They need to understand what the real needs and changes in the market are going to be, in order to respond to these needs. When Apple was faced with thousands of jailbroken iPhones they opened up their system by releasing the Apple software development kit (SDK) This has allowed thousands of professionals programmers and amateurs to come up with their own apps in order to 

strike it rich with this modern day gold rush.  

Innovative new ways to develop products and start up businesses have become possible with the use of crowdsourcing and crowd funding. Already back in the early 90s Linus Torvalds, (one of the main developers of Linux OS) utilized the help of hundreds software developers and programmers to come up with the first open source operating system in the world. Crowd funding, even though still at a quite moderate level, has enabled small companies to develop their products and bands to fund their operations.

Advertising online has been made more efficient and targeted with the help of different tracking programs utilizing cookies and more sophisticated tracking methods like the one offered by Cognitive Match. Another innovation in online marketing is product placement in videos, which has been in development for several years without much success. Now Impossible Software has come up with software that allows inserting still images or videos into videos (http://tcrn.ch/fwVNbL). The idea isn’t new but the level of technology has taken a huge leap forwards and the final product looks like a seamless entity. Combining product placement with video advertising, and finally with the tracking data of the individual user to allow personalized advertising, won’t revolutionize the digital marketing industry but could be a big thing soon.