What Corporations Can Learn From Startups
By Carter Cast and David Schonthal
Organic growth has softened. Purchase frequency has slowed. What to do? When pressed to innovate, many corporations have the same knee-jerk reaction: to hire people and spend money. They create cross-functional task-force teams and launch expensive, time-consuming market research studies, generating mounds of data, but to little effect.
Instead of helping a company bring new ideas to market, these efforts at spurring innovation often lead to counterproductive results, distancing the firm from the very group it wants to serve: their buying public. Instead of observing customers first-hand and drawing insights from their behavior, the company’s innovation teams becomes bogged down and bleary-eyed, managing task force meeting calendars and wading through reams of purchase rate propensities and lifetime value projections. Process gets in the way of progress. Company decision-makers find themselves staring at well-constructed PowerPoint decks and Excel models but are no closer to uncovering the searing insights that will translate into highly desired new products and services.