Inspire Innovate Integrate

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” — Steve Jobs.

Jobs was deeply bothered about the future of iPods, as the music lovers who own iPod need to carry around the two devices: cell phone & iPad. His worries were obvious, as he explained to the board, that the sales of digital cameras were at threat ever since the cellphones started shipping built-in cameras and the iPods were going to face the same consequences.

But he made the firm decision to not let the iPod endure. And this became the ultimate objective and incentive for him to develop the iPhone.

With the regular and one-to-one customer counseling, by observing the new rising technologies, by analyzing and supervising the alternative technologies, in the year 2007 Apple made the sale of its first iPhone with all the modern features.

Steve Jobs said, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will”.

In this era of information technology and the new technologies arriving every day, the digital cameras were not immune enough to survive and as the first sale of the iPhone got aired in 2007 and the sales of digital cameras dropped drastically. This affected the sales of the iPod too as the iPhone delivered both the functions of music and camera.

Definitely, the urge of exigency inspires a person to go beyond his limits and innovate something extraordinary. So this was the absolute inspiration behind the innovation of the iPhone.

The things we concluded from the above story are:

1. Never afraid to fail: Many brilliant startups declined before they even got into power in the market. Failure is the first step to success. Don’t let the failure weaken you, in fact, come back stronger after failure because you have learned the three things from the failure: failing once reduces the fear of failing again, what worked and what didn’t work, who was still standing with you

2. Think out of the box: This often means approaching the problem in a distinct innovative way. “Why fit in when you were born to stand out ?” — Dr. Seuss. Make your products unique by studying them from the customer’s perspective. Do not try to imitate your competitor’s products instead offer your own features and solve the customer problems in a more effective way. Most of the organizations closely imitate their competitors and focus on the same thing, just to keep up in the market. So it’s high time now, to abandon the crowd, and be a leader, be a problem solver.

“You can actually spend less and make more money in invention if you focus on the valleys, those places your competitors have overlooked” — Nolan Bushnell, the CEO of uWink

3. Appreciate every idea: I think there is no idea is a bad idea. The only task is to get those ideas out of the person’s head. For a person to speak up their ideas, an environment of candid communication is a must. This would bring out the most innovative ideas ever. The actual approval of the idea happens at the marketplace after the customer uses that product but to make up for the market you need to have some idea to be implemented. Hence the ideas and the honest feedback must always be welcomed.

4. Stay positive: It might not be easy when you are on the field. Negativity always strikes and the constant fear of failure enhances negativity. But you need to stay positive, firm, and determined to your cause of innovation. Positive attitude will provide you with an abundance of confidence to proceed on a path that is different in opinion from the other competitors, analysts, etc.

5. Inspire to solve the problem, not just innovate: Always concentrate on the needs and wants of your customers. Whatever you make, make it meaningful. When you believe in what you are doing you do it in a better way. So just believe in yourself. The real problems of the people need to be addressed by innovation. You can do this by the two ways: don’t be scared to take the risk and after taking a risk don’t feel shame if, by chance, you failed but learn from your mistakes and second is, always be passionate about using new technologies and new tools for your innovation.

As the common definition of integration says that when we integrate we bring things together with each other. Hence when the above inspirations are integrated they become viable for innovation. Therefore the concept of the 3i’s, that is, inspire, innovate, and integrate is the most transformative in entrepreneurship which not just leads to product development but also the improvements, time to time revisions, and updating according to technology.