The HR Calendar And Speed In Innovation

About two weeks ago, Laurie and I had this conversation via e-mail:

• Laurie: I bought thehrcalendar.com and I bet we could whip up something pretty easily. You in?
• Lance: Yeah, that would be cool.
• Laurie: How would we set that up?
• Lance: Let me think about it.
• Laurie: Let’s not make it hard on ourselves.
• Lance: What do you think of this?
• Laurie: Yay!

So The HR Calendar was born. A place to consolidate all of these events that we are forced to attend.

Maybe a little paraphrasing but it went from idea to reality in a couple days. It probably could have been faster (like a couple of hours) but it was around the holidays.

Welcome to the new fast

Projects like this remind me how much speed has been factor in driving innovation in the past couple of decades. Not saying that The HR Calendar is uber-innovative but it was born as a result of product development time lines that moved from years to months to weeks. I moved my blog with 300+ pages and 10,000+ backlinks to maintain to a new domain on a new server in five hours on a Friday night. Tell that to someone working with websites a decade ago and they would have laughed at you.

Much of the innovation today seems to be a series of small, incremental gambles over a period of time in consideration of being ahead of competitors on a product. Develop an initial project and roll it out alpha. Listen to those people, expand and roll out a beta. Listen to those people, expand and roll out a release. Continually improve the product in steps. All of the while, limited access to both information and product grows hype.

The advantages of being first to market seem harder for companies to ignore. And certainly if you are an established company, you have to be on your toes about competitors moving up. That being said…

Fast doesn’t always equal long term success

Being first isn’t always an easy road to success though. To be sure, many of the top companies that are mainstays in our lives (think Walmart, Target, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or Google) weren’t the first at almost anything they did. Walmart and Target weren’t the first general merchandise retailers or grocers, Amazon was not the first online retailer, Microsoft didn’t create the first operating system, Apple didn’t create the first MP3 player and Google wasn’t the first search engine. Sure, all of these companies were early adopters to success but instead of the focus on being first, they focused on being pretty fast with solid business moves behind the scenes and continued innovation in their core product areas.

Being fast helps but being first? It makes a good story, it doesn’t necessarily make a good sustainable business.

What Innovative Processes Work?

• It is best to be early to the game – You may not be first but being early means you can solidly execute and steal market share when competitors drop the ball. If you come late, you are going to be fighting people entrenched with product.
• Beta testing is how you test product – When well executed (like when beta community memebers havea stake in the outcome), beta testing can far and away be the best solution. If you can’t do beta testing well, you’re going to spend more and be slower.
• Incremental improvements or big release doesn’t matter – We’ve seen both methods work. We’ve even seen a combination of methods work. The iPod had a big heralded release but has since quietly updated the amount of space, user interface, and software programs every year.
• Doing it is the new research – Any half decent idea is being researched on the fly rather than the scenario planning and engineering that went into past product development. Outside of gigantic projects, getting something researched means producing a prototype and letting people get their hands dirty.

What do you think?