Innovation and Execution

Innovation is one of the keys for any business's success. Secondly, if you are emulating any successful product early with competing quality, then you can see the success. There were many companies executed well and shown very great results. As there is always emulation new innovations happen, you have to keep innovating things and execute well to succeed in business. Innovation is needed not only in Product but in everything that we do.

Recently Apple announced their Q3 2011 results. They have shown 82% revenue growth in Q3 Y-O-Y. The iPhone sales count increased by 143% and iPads 182%. At the same time their iPod growth was 32% and Mac was 17%.

If you see the history of Apples revenue, after the initial success, they suffered many years until Steve took charge. Steve Jobs faces ups and downs during his initial stages. They didn't grow much until 2005. There comes their new innovation iPhone entered into the market. After the release of iPhone, they were growing year over year. In 2010, they released the iPad with the touch based similar to iPhone.

They made an exceptional growth in the first half of 2011 and the credit goes to Steve. Even though the tablet PCs are in the market, the innovation they made in the UI/Touch based and their perfect execution, brought them the success.

The other company that has shown great growth by mere execution is Google. Even though their main product is Search with unique algorithm and a great innovation, their AdWords is the main revenue bringing product. AdWords is a replica of the ad model invented and introduced by Overture.

Google copied that business model and introduced it in early 2000. They executed very well and keep introducing new models and new schemes like AdSence into AdWords. Their aggressive improvements and the reach of the search made them to grow exponentially. In addition to this, Yahoo was using the AdWords for Yahoo marketing for some time that added value to the AdWords growth. In 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture and moved to their own Ad hosting service. But they were not able to compete with AdWords and merged it with Microsoft Adcenter.

Today AdWords is the major revenue contributor to Google. More than 80 % of the revenue of Google is from AdWords. Even though Android is picking up momentum, it has not yet reached the great revenue mode.

Google has reduced their inventions (Google Labs is stopped and most of the Google projects are stopped after Pages taken over as CEO), they are concentrating on the existing market and they want to grow by executing well. This(reducing the experiments) might be a wrong move but they may excel as their execution is exceptionally good.

The third example is Nokia vs Samsung. Nokia was dominating the phone world in the early and mid-2000. But after the introduction of iPhone, they didn't change and they are almost lost the battle. At the same time Samsung keep themself adopting to the latest changes and they were keep releasing various models competing with iPhone, they were able to perform (even though they are facing legal issues).

Saravanan