2.2 The Continuous Improvement Trend as a Result of the Continuous Innovation

Something that has been occurring a lot more in recent years is the principle of continuous innovation. Continuous innovation is the idea that a firm is constantly improving itself and its products. Never slowing down and never stopping for a second to be satisfied with where they are, they constantly keep flowing forward.

A recent trend has been to launch products and services before they’re truly ready. Read on to learn more about just how interesting this can be.

WELL IF GOOGLE IS DOING IT…

Gmail was launched years ago to fanfare. It was by far the best email system on the planet having made some incremental improvements on services like Hotmail by blocking distracting flash ads and added the principle of grouping messages together into a “conversation view”. [1]

The service launched and did very well. It performed amazingly. And a lot of people were confused by the fact that the service said “Beta” right on the logo.

Years later Gmail was still in Beta. What was going on?

The first version of Gmail that launched was not the best, the fastest, or the easiest to use that the software engineers could conceptualize. They wanted more, wanted it to be better.

But they also had a finished product that worked amazingly and was better than what any competitor had on the market.

So they launched it anyway and threw up the words “Beta” on it. They then dedicated themselves to continually improving it – something they still do today despite the fact that it is no longer in Beta. [2]

Google is (across all its services) deeply devoted to the principle of continuous innovation. They literally never stop improving their products.

Kotler and Trias de Bes talk about continuous innovation as being a sum of projects in their book Winning At Motivation: The A-To-F Model. When we look at Google we see that’s exactly how they build so much competitive advantage.

Each day employees show up at work with the goal of making Google’s products and services better in some way, shape, or form. They design and assign projects and as those projects stack into the services each day, week, and month the innovation becomes continuous.

This is a key concept the two authors want to point out. Innovation processes must have a deadline. That deadline comes and the project launches and new ones begin – this is the concept of continuous innovation.

It’s not the dangerous thought of “we’re never done improving so let’s just sit back and keep making it better” but rather a planned, strategic method of saying “We’re going to make this specific thing better. We’ll have it done and implemented by next Tuesday, on Monday we’ll figure out the next thing we’re going to fix.”

Project management then plays a critical role in the principles of continuous innovation. Again, it’s not free form but instead deliberately managed never ending projects.

That’s not to say that innovation cannot be unplanned, sometimes with breakthroughs that’s just how it works. The idea is that when companies innovate they do so with tasks. Miles, Miles, and Snow point out in Collaborative Entrepreneurship that continuous innovation is a natural fit for targeting new markets and that forming alliances with other companies but only if it’s that special kind of unplanned breakthrough.

This kind of scenario occurs when an employee sits down with a patent and suddenly realizes there is a completely new product they can offer. In that eureka moment they run to the marketing department who verifies it’s plausible in the market and odds are that a new target market will appear. [3]

For the kind of continuous improvement that involves always making products better these eureka moments probably won’t occur and that’s okay – you’re finding better ways to serve your existing customers and that’s the most important thing you can be doing.

The company 37 Signals wrote a book called Rework which discussed this and many other important concepts in firms that run lean and are dedicated on continually improving. It’s short and easy to read and a recommended addition to your library.

37 Signals produces Highrise customer relationship management software) and like Gmail they deliberately set out to enter the market and continually keep making the product better but here is the key – they don’t just stack on unnecessary features, each one is carefully thought out and only added if it makes using their software easier and is a necessary feature. Otherwise they think it doesn’t belong.

Just final things for you to think about before you start charging head first into continuous innovation.