Daily Inspiration: “Disruptive innovation? It’s all about reinventing, rebuilding, redoing, realigning, re-adapting, and rethinking!”

“Disruptive innovation? It’s all about reinventing, rebuilding, redoing, realigning, re-adapting, and rethinking!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Your ability to reimagine your future is critical. Your ability to actually reinvent yourself to get there is absolutely magical.

I love doing corporate dinner award ‘shows’ – I think it is a critical way of encouraging and supporting innovation – so much so, that I’ve written a blog post about the importance of award shows. Over my 25 year career, I’ve probably done at least 10 of these events, and love the opportunity to participate in an event where ‘innovation heroes’ are recognized. This particular dinner event is for major customers of Chemours, a global chemicals company – and specifically to recognize those who had developed new and innovative products.

My keynote focused on the accelerating scientific and other trends that would continue to drive product innovation into the future, with a key message that change is now happening faster than ever before. The event really goes to one of my main observations about the future:

“Companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived using materials not yet in existence with methodologies yet to be defined. Are you ready to reinvent to keep up?”

At some point in time, if it has not yet happened, you’ll come to realize that the future that you thought you had no longer exists, and that you need to do something new. And if you are a business organization, that realization brings you the reality that you need to reinvent your revenue.

This resulted in the reality that in an era in which much of your future revenue will come from products or services that don’t yet exist, your legacy might very well be your death sentence!

What are the driving trends that define a need for regular, continuous revenue reinvention? There are many. Product lifecycles have become shorter; market longevity is not guaranteed; new competitors emerge faster; customers display less loyalty. These trends and many more mean that you don’t have any guarantee that the product or service that you are offering today will be in demand tomorrow – or even relevant.

And so, reinvent, redo, realign, rethink….