Ask your customers what they want and give it to them!
Sorta true, but meh. Here is the thing:
This approach won’t lead you to a solution that changes the status quo. It’ll never disrupt and if you’re in a competitive space, others will have likely done it.
Want to revolutionize an industry WITHOUT technological innovation?
Look for meta-trends and adapt to them, and serve your customers better in new ways.
There’s almost always an opportunity to find one of these 5 ways to create a new category and stand out:
1. integrating existing (partial) tools and solutions: in a maturing market, you’ll have multiple tools to tackle a set of problems. Your new problem is getting the multiple tools to work together.
2. antiquated/old/wrong ways of approaching a problem: Infinityn International recognized that enterprises wanting more SQOs really need more concise and aligned growth ops, instead of just lead generation. They created Agile Account-Based Growth as a category for companies wanting more+better SQOs.
3. new needs popping up that have no solution: Covid/WFH provides opportunity in almost any industry to tackle new challenges
4. applying an approach from another industry: the agile approach was copied by marketers from software and revolutionized the way marketing ops is done.
5. taking a generic solution and making it niche-specific: hiflySODA by Hiflylabs does this: they’re applying data science solutions specifically to retail sector-needs in a specific sub-segment of retail businesses.
