During our recent webinar, we asked attendees what was most important to their business in relation to print workflows: Storefronts, Interfaces, Integration, Automation, Speed? The majority felt that the integration was key and really, no one can argue against this.
Integration impacts all the other answers; indeed, it is the link between them all. That is the whole point of an integration, to ease the workflow, reduce the need for manual intervention and streamline work across the process, ideally to such a point that automation is 100% of the process; from the job arriving at the print house, through to it running off the presses, even being loaded onto a van and a delivery ticket being printed. Integrations save time, human input and ultimately money by helping generate a better ROI. Along with storefronts, a close second, was automation, which as we have touched on, is really the result of integration.
But perhaps we were asking the wrong questions, or emitting a key aspect relevant to all the possible answers and something that they all depend on. How important is innovation to your business? After all, it is innovation that has driven all of the above and it still remains the critical driving force.
As existing Infigo customers will hopefully be aware, innovation, or more specifically disruptive innovation is a vital aspect of business development that all businesses wanting to grow in the 2020s and beyond need to be aware of and master. Infigo Software provides a key catalyst for many disruptive innovators in the print world, and beyond. What is disruptive innovation you may ask…
As with many of the buzz words and techie terms that have emerged over the past 20 years, the phrase ‘disruptive innovation’ came out of Harvard Business School. Specifically, it was coined first in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. Christensen termed any innovations that evolve new markets by discovering new categories of customers as ‘disruptive innovations’. They do this, he proposed, partially by adopting new technologies but also by developing new business models and exploiting existing technologies in new ways.
So how important is disruptive innovation to your business? Not important enough is the answer according to new research by multinational media and digital marketing communications company, Dentsu Aegis. They estimate that just 25% of UK marketers identify “leading disruptive innovation” as a core priority. The international average is a worrying 10% higher, and the low figure sets the UK at the bottom of the list of the 1000 CMOs and senior marketeers over the 10 countries that were looked at.
The study by Dentsu Aegis found that UK based senior marketeers are more focused on “developing overall customer experience” – a result that chimes with the poll we conducted in our joint webinar with Tharsterns.
The warning that the Dentsu Aegis study reveals is something, however, that we have been shouting about for some time too, especially in the printing world: brands that don’t innovate risk failure. Innovation is critical in today’s digital-first, always-on uberised society. “Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined that a technology company could make taxis cool. These brands demonstrate what marketing can achieve when it thinks disruptively,” notes Dentsu Aegis. New ways of looking at prospective markets and how to reach them with innovative applications of new technology has driven the creative process across all sectors; failure to recognise this, stay relevant and adapt will ultimately prove fatal for those foolish enough to lag behind.
This, ‘innovator’s dilemma’ is what marketeers and business development officers must grapple with today: do they tighten grip on existing markets with improved offerings, a short-sighted approach, or should they look to grow into new markets with new business models built around new technologies?
We think the answer is clear. Disruptive innovation, a critical component within the martech arena, is changing the way the world behaves and changing consumer expectations. Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Skype, iTunes, Airbnb … the list grows annually, and it is driving innovation across all sectors as companies strive to keep up, not least print.
