As corporate competition intensifies and product life cycles shorten, the pressure to innovate is only expected to heighten.
As a result, more companies are continually aiming to accomplish low cost coupled with high-quality services and products.
Despite more companies entering new lucrative markets, devising new competitive advantages, and deploying novel business models, sustainable development cannot happen without innovation.
In today’s blog, we seek to discuss noteworthy innovations from world leaders.
These have not only responded to changes in the environment and societal pressures, but have also considered the needs and expectations of various unique stakeholders.
7 Successful Innovation Examples
The primary focus of today’s discussion is disruptive innovations.
Disruptive innovations make expensive or complex products and services easily accessible, and more affordable to a broader market.
Generally speaking, innovation is considered a disruptive technology when it does much better than the old way of doing things.
1. Ride-hailing
The inception of ride-hailing created a new vehicle-for-hire transportation service that was originally controlled by taxicabs.
The first company to avail this unique service creatively conceptualised ride-hailing as a contractor-based individual driving system to create flexible job opportunities, making vehicle for hire access faster and more affordable.
Consequently, this innovation facilitated the adoption of similar services and models by other companies like the biking and the aviation industry.
2. Medical drones
Medical delivery drones are employed to deliver mission-critical medical supplies to patients living in remote areas of countries like Rwanda. These drones, called Zips, can transport vaccines, or blood to patients expeditiously.
Essentially, a health worker simply texts an order for the medical supplies they require to a central distribution centre.
And within minutes, a Zip is quickly loaded and launched, travelling at approximately 100 km/h to its intended destination, where the supplies are accurately dropped via a paper parachute.
3. Automobiles
Prior to the invention of the automobile, horse-drawn carriages, trains and trolleys were commonplace.
However, the inventors of the automobile observed a need for faster and personalised means of transportation. As a result, the automobile eternally changed the way humans travel. Later on, the first automobile fueled subsequent innovations like the aeroplane.
3. Search engines
Internet search engines are one of the most common examples of contemporary innovation. Search engines offer a broader online experience for consumers, functioning as extensive knowledge base search systems to streamline the capacity for human learning.
4. Solar Rechargeable Hearing Aids
Tens of millions of people globally are in need of hearing aids as 7% of people globally suffer from some form of hearing defect. However, in less developed countries, less than 3% of people can afford to buy a hearing aid.
Fortunately, Solar Ear responded to this need with an affordable solar rechargeable hearing aid. This highly resistant and durable innovation is built and assembled by deaf people hired by Solar Ear.
5. Cellphones
The international success of the cellphone forever changed the way people communicate. Before the cellphone, humans mainly relied on landlines and other archaic communication methods.
As such, communication was not always readily accessible and confined a person to a specific location if they sought to talk with other people. However, the inventors of the cellphone saw a dire need for mobile communication, and thus conceptualised the idea of a mobile phone not confined to a cord.
Though the cellphone went through multiple iterations over the years, it eventually ended up as the small portable device that exists today. The cellphones were later replaced by the smartphone, and continue to evolve with the modern era innovations and ideas.
6. Publishing industry
The publishing industry was full of traditions and habits, and also a very inefficient business.
Fortunately, Amazon came with a unique digital infrastructure to find books. As a result, written ideas could move from one person to another more quickly, and with much less cost and hassle.
Overall, the publishing industry underwent significant disruption as Amazon pushed down book prices by controlling the point of sale.
Consequently, more self-publishers flooded the market with cheap books but delivered high-quality work that competed with traditionally published books. Thus, birthing a new business model that lured authors away from traditional deals.
Conclusion
Today’s turbulent business environment demands innovation-driven change—both radical and incremental change. This is especially true with how the world is fast changing in terms of technological demands.
Generally speaking, organisations that effectively manage knowledge and take risks can easily create new innovations that disrupt the status quo in a manner similar to the aforementioned innovations.
Planning to drive innovation in your organisation by arranging training, workshops and coaching using the latest VR technology? Reach out to us at Growth Academy Asia to know more about our programmes which are powered by Jenson8 – a virtual reality technology recognised in the Gartner 2021 Market Guide for Corporate Learning.
Co-founder and Director of Learning and Development
David Simpson, originally from Northern Ireland and with a background in psychology, has significantly impacted the learning and development landscape in Asia. In 2002, he co-founded Team Building Asia, one of Asia’s most successful team building companies, and he has been stimulating innovation in corporate training ever since. Co-founder of Growth Academy Asia, David challenges teams to reach their highest potential through experiential, interactive and immersive workshops with a meaningful business outcome.
