SIT is a great tool to make innovation happen. But why do we need innovation?
I will skip the obvious: innovation is needed to adapt to an ever changing commercial, social and technological environment.
Apart from the above, innovation is needed to generate something that almost every business needs to survive: attention.
Like any other resource that businesses need (e.g. energy, employees, row materials etc.) attention can be purchased in the market in the form of advertising, public relations or even search engine optimization. The problem is that its price is going up every day.
With more than 1000 commercial messages (explicit and implicit) any individual in developed countries is exposed to each day, it’s getting harder and harder to get the message through. .
Innovation can lower the price of getting attention:
In SIT, we say that the term NPD stands for New Promise Development, in addition to its more ordinary meaning New Product Development.
We explain that when our customers want us to innovate and bring them something new and exciting, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a product. It could be a new promise, new usages or new packaging for an existing product. A classic example comes from Orbit: Remember when chewing a gum was something you did just to freshen your breathe? Orbit reinvented the chewing gum category by promoting the anti decay benefit of its chewing gum.
We believe that developing new promises is always a great way to innovate, but in a time of recession we may need new promises even more.
