Yep. You can’t innovate by saying “make something innovative by copying AirTable”. At that point you’re no longer an “incubator” but a fast-follow and is a standard product development cycle.
Seems Yahoo! tried to solve this with their "brickhouse" program, a new product incubator, but ultimately it seems that was too disruptive and got axed.
These trends are either evolutionary or entirely predictable. Several so predictable that they first made their debut in movies long before most of us were born.
I think this is what he means. Working on any of these ideas doesn't make you an innovator. You might do something in a slightly better or more novel way, but we aren't inventing crap.
And if you don't execute on your slightly better path, you'll still be beat by someone with a slightly worse idea who buckled down and delivered.
Silicon Valley is littered with companies with better ideas and better base products that lost.
I actually completely agree with your definition of innovation and that's exactly how I think about it.
What I would ask you is, how have you guys innovated with your definition in mind? When I said I saw no innovation I meant that I literally saw a carbon copy of a dozen other products out there. Do you take in mind those other products as part of that refinement cycle you mention? If so, how is yours the next step in refinement and what has changed or become more streamlined?
I understand this may be your goal moving forward, but I still see it as a bit silly to start at the same exact point as a dozen other startups and hope that you'll somehow beat them in a race of iterating and in turn innovating.
I attended a startup seminar where speakers were founders from highly successful startups. Their advice was: "First imitate and then innovate". It is a usual business practice to first copy what's working for others, then innovate to make it better and leave the competition behind. It makes sense specially in a web industry where it takes very little time to catchup with competition. Companies have to keep innovating to keep an edge over imitators. Web industry doesn't have number 2 concept. It is either number 1 or out of business. I think not having room for number 2 is what is forcing companies to copy others work and kill the competition.
Innovations may be happening, and perhaps it's unreasonable to expect major leaps, but none of these incremental innovations seem big enough to make anyone stand out for very long.
It goes against the whole idea of open source hardware, but making the fruits of your R&D labors available for anyone to copy also ensures that even if you are innovating, you don't have much of a window to differentiate yourself within before your competitors catch up.
exactly. given that, if you want to be the next Bill Gates or Larry & Sergey or Mark Zuckerberg then you should focus on spotting some new but already existing invention and crate a competitor that is just slightly better then the original.
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