Malcolm Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker not too long ago about innovation. One of the things he basically said is you don’t really want to be the first to innovate something. You want to come along later and make the innovation better.
Common business philosophy says you absolutely want to be the first no matter what. You want to get the product out first, market it first, grab as much of the market space as possible, as fast as possible.
Honestly, though, that’s not really how things work anymore, not in this era of goliath corporations. More often than not, the small innovators are gobbled up by the biggies, usually pretty early on.
It’s rare for a company like Facebook to go from a startup to a goliath. Had things gone the usual way, Mark Zuckerberg would have sold out to Microsoft or somebody when things started rolling.
Big corporations have people on staff who find little guys making new technologies within their industry. Once they find one, the big company makes an offer on the little guy.
The little guy usually accepts because the offers are often a lot of money for them and also it’s hard to compete against the big guys, which is what they might end up doing if they continued on their own.
Small companies can’t compete against corporations with tremendous R&D budgets. Which is why the biggies are out-innovating the innovators these days as well as taking them over. Someone makes something. A big company throws all its R&D money at it and makes it better.
It happened with BlackBerry maker RIM. For years, BlackBerries were the smartphones. They were the first really good, really popular smartphone out.
Then along came Apple, the computer giant. They blew BlackBerry out of the water from an innovation standpoint with the iPhone. From a sales point too eventually, along with Android.
And speaking of Android, Google is a perfect example of an out-innovate-the-innovator giant. That company is literally into everything these days.
So between the huge buyout offers and the R&D budgets of the giants, small innovators are often swept under the rug.
So is it really better to be first?
