Innovation becoming one of a word that correlates with the startup that still growing enormously in Indonesia. Even though, all companies must have innovation, from conventional companies to massive companies that using a lot of technology. Then, what is the difference between startup innovation and corporate innovation? The answer to this question was answered by Alfred Boediman in an online seminar titled “Designing the Innovation Process Model, Corporate Model vs Start-Up Process”.
Not only finding the newest technology, but the innovation discussed by Alfred Boediman also talking about how to find something different inside of a market that produces a similar product.
Alfred Boediman said that innovation becoming very important in this day because innovation can make a company win the market or defend its market. For supporting this idea, he said: “Innovation business will die if they only sell the same thing repeatedly”. But it doesn’t mean that innovation becoming the only thing that the company has to concern. The innovation has to match the market’s needs. For about one hour of speech, there are a lot of interesting ideas that were given. Some of them are innovation’s paradox, organization’s life cycle (especially business), start-up dilemma, and corporate innovation model that was divided into two models, open model and closed model.
Surprisingly there are a lot of companies that trapped in the innovation paradox. They trapped in fear of failure hence they see innovation is a risky option. The companies also don’t see innovation as a strategy therefore their life as a company becomes shorter and can’t compete with another rising competitor. Usually, innovation paradox occurred in conventional companies.
On the other side, a start-up that doing a lot of innovation also have some dilemma. In this case, they only plan for one or two years ahead, in other words, it’s very short. “We have to think ‘leaping’, must think minimum two to three years even five to ten years ahead”, said Alfred Boediman explaining about this problem. The other thing is, it is a lot of start-ups afraid of copying another company that already creates the same kind of product. In Alfred Boediman’s point of view, creating another product that similar to another one is understandable, but the disruptive innovation will create a difference.
From this explanation about innovation, Alfred Boediman implicitly pushes students of SBM ITB to keep innovating in growing or maintaining their business. Another interesting idea from Alfred Boediman is to digitalize all business aspects that can be digitalized. “All things that can be digitalized, could change into digitalizing immediately”. Alfred connected digitalization with the Covid-19 that will turn consumers become more reluctant to go outside their house.