When most people think about the process of driving innovation within an organization, they tend to think that to be innovative, the idea - or change - needs to be BIG. Too often the feeling is that if it's not big, then it's not innovative.
But often, the strongest returns come from the smallest innovations.
Some of the best innovations come from ideas that don't, on their surface, seem very big at all. For innovation to have an impact, the thing that needs to be "big" is the risk of changing the way things have historically been done, not the idea.
A great example of this can be found in Borders Books. There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal about how Borders is changing the way they display the majority of their books in their stores.
So what's the innovation?
Well, to jumpstart sales, Borders is drastically increasing the amount of books it displays on shelves with the cover face-out, rather than relying on the traditional way of showing just the spine.
So at first blush you're probably thinking - "Duh! That sound pretty obvious, no? Innovative??"
But, in fact, to make this change, Borders stores will have to reduce by 5% to 10% the number of titles they stock. In the age of the Long Tail, where book stores have to compete with the deep inventories of Amazon.com, this change is not that small. From a business standpoint, It's actually quite big.
The Journal states:
"The new display strategy is the brainchild of CEO George Jones, who says he learned when he was a buyer at Dillard's Inc. early in his career that dresses sell better when the entire garment is shown rather than hung sleeve-out. So he recently decided to test sales of books shown with the cover visible at a newly built prototype store in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the company has its headquarters. Results were so encouraging after the first two weeks -- sales of individual titles were 9% higher than at similar Borders stores -- that all of the retailer's superstores have been told to adopt the new strategy. The concept store gave us the opportunity to start from scratch and do it exactly as we wanted to do," Mr. Jones says.
For me, these types of innovations are ultimately the most effective ones because what they end up doing is breaking what is the most powerful roadblocks to innovation: "This is the way we've been doing it for years."
There's a terrific quote in the article from John Deighton, the editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He says"
"Breakfast cereals are not stocked end-of-box out. You want to your product to be as enticing as possible. It's a little bizarre that it's taken booksellers this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the product as tempting as possible."
For me, true innovation is about taking a risk and changing the way your business is done.
This has got to be one of the ugliest devices ever made. Reminds me of an old Brother typewriter. A-W-F-U-L
If I were to pick one single website that not only embodies the principles of the "social web" to the fullest, but also delivers the most enjoyable and satisfying online retail experience on the internet, it would surely be Threadless.com.
Threadless is the ultimate case study on how technology, community, and commerce can be woven together to create something truly special.
On Friday, Threadless took a major step forward by opening their first brick-and-mortar retail store in their hometown of Chicago. Not surprisingly, Threadless is injecting a good dose of Web2.0 thinking into the process.
Threadless explains their motivation for opening the store by saying:
Why a store? A zillion reasons. Most of them revolve around ideas we come up with for giving back to the Threadless community and not having the staff, resources, venue or time to make happen. Ideas like teaching design classes, hosting galleries with Threadless artist's work, having real-world group critiques and other various events.
Another big reason has to do more with our product. We've been quite selective with which shops carry Threadless product and have even turned down some big-box retailers. Our reason for doing so is twofold. First, our product line changes every week and most retailers are not equipped to handle change that fast. Second, the story behind each of our products and who creates them, how they are created, scored and selected for print often gets lost in a traditional retail environment. Our tees lose some of their specialness and become just another tee on the shelf.
A lot of people have tried to re-think the brick-and-mortar retail environment in the age of the Internet, but nobody has really done it all that well yet. Other than Apple. My feeling is that if anyone is going to do it right, it's going to be Threadless.
(photo nicked from Outlaw01's Flickr stream here)
You can read more about the various features of the store via the following links:
· New Tees Every Friday
· Learn Something Upstairs in the Gallery
· Reusable Bag Coupons
· Weekly Mashup Store Window Paintings
· Arzie13 and Glennz Store Launch Tee
Personally, I can't wait for my next trip to Chicago to check out the store. For those involved in the retail sales, Threadless is definately one to watch and learn from.
