{"id":39548,"date":"2020-10-05T07:01:56","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T05:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strtgy.design\/articles\/the-cat-in-the-innovation-box\/"},"modified":"2020-10-05T07:01:56","modified_gmt":"2020-10-05T05:01:56","slug":"the-cat-in-the-innovation-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strtgy.design\/en\/strtgy-notes-en\/the-cat-in-the-innovation-box\/","title":{"rendered":"The cat in the innovation box"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey, happy Monday,<\/span><\/p>\n

Had a good weekend?<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote this note on Sunday evening to stop some thoughts that came to my mind after a beautiful and long talk with a dear friend whom I have seen in person only on Saturday since the lockdown in March.<\/span><\/p>\n

You should know that we are a little less than 20 years apart and he is someone I would listen to for hours (which I did) and absorb, as if by osmosis, his experience. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of the two, he is the “old man,” and this difference in “wisdom” allows me to frame things from an angle that is, as far as I am concerned, extremely interesting: that of the entrepreneurs and managers of those small and medium-sized enterprises responsible for much of Italy’s GDP.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s what we talked about…<\/span><\/p>\n

Simultaneously alive and dead<\/h2>\n

He told me that he had gone into a lamp store to buy about 20 abat jour, the cordless kind with batteries, to put on the tables in his restaurant. <\/span><\/p>\n

He is someone with very clear ideas. He never wastes time. He was straight to the point. Model and quantity. Unfortunately, he came out empty-handed. <\/span><\/p>\n

The store owner told him it would take 15 days to get them.<\/span><\/p>\n

As soon as he left the store, he only had to type the first few letters of the pattern into Amazon’s search box to find out that he could receive them, all 20 of them, in 2 days because he does not have Amazon Prime. Otherwise in one day. <\/span><\/p>\n

He realized that that store, one of the most famous in Florence, is simultaneously open but also closed, forever.<\/span><\/p>\n

Open because he actually was able to go inside, talk to the owner and look at the display model. <\/span><\/p>\n

Closed because you cannot justify today the benefit of waiting 15 days from the official retailer to get what the internet promises to deliver to you in 24 hours (probably from the same manufacturer).<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I agree with my friend: that store is simultaneously alive and dead, like Schr\u00f6dinger’s famous cat.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact is that there are thousands of Italian businesses in the same condition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Outsourcing the Future<\/h2>\n

How many entrepreneurs excel in the quality of their products? So many. <\/span><\/p>\n

Credit is often due to the ability, among others, to know how to acquire the right raw materials, a knowledge learned in the field, perhaps handed down.<\/span><\/p>\n

How many of these are capable of buying, in the same way, innovation. Very few. <\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it is necessary to make it clear that innovation is not purchased, but the ability to innovate is acquired. <\/span><\/p>\n

I purposely used the expression “buying innovation” to accurately describe the typical doing of entrepreneurs and managers, of those small and medium-sized enterprises, responsible for much of the Italian GDP I mentioned at the beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n

They buy a new website.<\/span><\/p>\n

They buy a new app.<\/span><\/p>\n

They buy e-commerce.<\/span><\/p>\n

They buy a new brand.<\/span><\/p>\n

They buy a new [insert name of your service].<\/span><\/p>\n

As if all you need to do is buy a shiny box from a supplier outside your company that you can install in your company and just turn it on to make things work better.<\/span><\/p>\n

The moment you make this decision you are deliberately delegating the most important thing any company has: the relationship with its customers.<\/span><\/p>\n

You are outsourcing your future.<\/span><\/p>\n

The essential is invisible to the eyes<\/h2>\n

It is possible to trace back to three elements what defines a company’s ability to withstand competition and thus survive: People, Processes and Products, our 3Ps.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of these 3Ps, only one shows up well in the budget, that of products that sit there waiting to find a customer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the P of People understood as Corporate Culture and the P of Processes understood as the ability to interact, collaborate, and make decisions are invisible to the eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n

When deciding to invest in the next competitive advantage, it would be too easy to buy in bulk and put a simple deductible cost on the balance sheet without impacting other areas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Innovating means investing in People, in building the culture that enables growth and allows the Processes by which value is created to evolve.<\/span><\/p>\n

Innovating means developing skills to develop new skills, learning to improve the ability to learn, experimenting to accelerate new experiments, and experiencing to learn from experiences. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pardon the pun, but I hope I made my point. Many times, behind the request to redo a site, app or e-commerce, there is more of a change-management project than simple execution. <\/span><\/p>\n

That is why you, too, could be in a box right now like Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat. You could simultaneously survive or succumb to the effects of technological transformation changing people’s behaviors and consequently the market. <\/span><\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/span><\/p>\n

Good work!<\/span>
\n<\/span>Make yourself heard.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3:43 reading – 50% alive, 50% dead, outsourcing the future, People, Processes and Products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strtgy-notes-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe cat in the innovation box - STRTGY<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/strtgy.design\/en\/strtgy-notes-en\/the-cat-in-the-innovation-box\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The cat in the innovation box - 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