I'm going to talk about something we often wonder: What distinguishes between a leader and a follower in terms of innovation?

First up, let's start with a leader.

So a leader is usually someone who has discovered an insight before anyone else, or at least they've been able to capitalize on that insight before Anyone else That might be a customer frustration, a need or desire. Or an emerging trend. So not only have they captured upon that, but they've also gone and built a solution that effectively solves that problem or capitalizes on that emerging trend.

A leader is also someone who is effectively validated that they can solve a problem that's worth solving. That is that there's an actual market where people are willing to pay for that solution.

And a leader also has managed to work out how to actually continually, consistently, and profitably execute or produce a solution or a product that solves that effective problem so that they're getting a great r o I. Now, let's compare that to the follower.

Now a follower in many ways when it comes to innovating, I prefer to call them usually a laggard. They're a little bit slower to catch upon the insight, and they look really hard at analyzing what the leaders might have been doing in innovation. But they might realize that maybe the leaders have dealt with these things, but they've dropped the ball with this particular issue.

And that might be that there's an unmet need. A desire or frustration that they then capitalize on in order to create an innovation. So a follow up provided they can see an unmet or, I , an insight that hasn't been taken up on can also innovate to capture a new market where the existing market feels like there's an unmet need, that still needs to be served.

So the question might be, should you be a leader or a follower? I would argue that you should be both a leader and also a continual innovator so that you actually can keep above all of the followers. So that is that once you create your product or your new service, you don't sit and forget, but you'd periodically look back and go, is there anything that we are missing?

Is there a frustration that we haven't dealt with in order to fill those gaps? So that you can actually totally block out any competitors ever taking any of your market share.

I hope that's been of value to you. Make sure you check out our website for more valuable insights.

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Nils Vesk

Innovation Keynote Speaker, Author, Consultant