Slumdog Sales? Fight Back With Innovation

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business | Tags: innovation

Oscar-winning director, Danny Boyle had this advice for the British film industry: “Persist. Keep going. Do all you can do… and keep Film 4 well funded.” As companies trim budgets and stare at slumdog sales charts, Danny Boyle’s advice will pay dividends.

Hard times compel the ambitious, inspire the creative. Will King, creator of the King of Shaves grooming range, launched a global business at home, from a back room, in 1992, when he had just lost his job. Poor thing, all that time on his hands to make a fortune.

Two years ago, wandering the aisles of an out of town Miami pharmacy, I noticed neat little rows of miniature excellence. What was remarkable about this King of Shaves merchandise encounter, in a dodgy little drugstore, the kind you see in CSI when someone is robbed at gunpoint, was that Will King had made a neck itch solution stretch all the way from Henley-on-Thames to Miami.

He did it without getting whacked by Gillette, or carved up by Wilkinson Sword. Innovation designed to meet a tangible need, can and will out-manoeuvre huge marketing budgets.

Last year, Multimap was bought by Microsoft. Its creator, Sean Phelan, had started this nerdy little mapping project in a back room of his house, designing the programme at night, marketing it by day. While we’re on the nerdy little project theme, let’s not forget Bill Gates and his garage – the maternity suite of an IT revolution.

Short of building backrooms and garages at every glorious glass and steel head office, companies need to invest in more ‘Google-Time’. The United Kingdom’s hierarchy of corporate needs tends to include a predilection to know what employees are doing every fifteen minutes. If you can stop them Flickering, Twittering and Facebooking, you won’t keep them off their highly connected mobile phones. If staff are bored, and your profits floored, there may be a connection, don’t you think?

It takes corporate courage to set employees free, even a little. It takes a strong stomach to endure another round of business clichés like empowerment and brain bank, but what choice do competitive firms have? Swedish authors Nordström and Ridderstrale encourage us to make capital dance, to a new beat, every day. Dancing can be a little clumsy at first, but there’s nothing to get the corporate heart beating faster than a well choreographed tango. Innovation in Britain needs Strictly-style champions, true believers capable of facing down failure and harsh judges.

Britain needs leaders animated by science and thought; good dinner companions, lateral thinkers, readers. When an idea is sketched, work up the detail with a small, talented team of specialists, not an unwieldy squad of competing egos. Getting a concept to market fast is now crucial for success. Today’s challenge is to be the first to market, not the first to register intellectual property. Build the brand with force - attack, refine and surge again. Innovation is not for the faint-hearted, it’s for the cavalry.