Is Innovation a synonym for Marketing?
Is Innovation just a different label for Marketing? Another trend in Marketing? Marketing tactics have always aimed at solving business and customer problems, at creating value and at differentiating brands from competition. Just like Innovations.
The above goals are indeed common between Marketing and Innovation, especially for those of us who focus on Horizon 2 level innovation. Having worked in marketing for 30 years and in innovation for 5 years, I believe the key characteristic for innovative solutions is simply “New“. So I agree with Webster’s definition of innovation: “the introduction of something new”.
Traditional marketing typically uses best practices, trying to improve those and making them more efficient. To lead and differentiate from competition, we need both: marketing and innovation. An Innovation is something new, something that has never been done before. “Never” can be defined with levels ranging from incremental to radical (I added a few healthcare examples):
- never been done for the brand. Example: a call center is created to support oncology patients to go through their treatment journey – this center was originally created for the company’s diabetes drug, to help patients to continue to take their daily medication.
- never been done in the company. Example: borrowing smart refrigerators to healthcare providers in poor regions to safely store our vaccines in their office. Other companies made storage refrigerators available, think Coke vending machines.
- never been done in the industry. Example: micro loans for Hepatitis C patients that can not afford to pay for their treatment during the short-term treatment period. Micro loans originally were used in the financial industry to help poor entrepreneurs succeed by taking on reasonable small business loans safely.
- never, ever been done before. Example: use drones to deliver vaccines in remote areas and on the way back transport rubbish out of the remote area (solving 2 health problems: disease prevention and pollution reduction).
As Albert Einstein said:
“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.”
So, as Innovation Leader, when I evaluated new innovation ideas or organized innovation challenges, the first criterion was always “how innovative, new is the idea?”. Immediately after that came “what business/customer problem does the innovation idea try to address?”
More about this topic: Eight Reasons why Innovation beats Efficiency and Tradition vs Disruption – does marketing have to choose?
What do you think? Please share below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele