Consumer Product Innovation – How Can Big Companies Compete   by Michael Li Matthews

in Business / Management    (submitted 2011-11-23)

In large companies, the idea of consumer product innovation was a thing of chance. Great product innovations within corporations are rarely the result of sr. brand managers or others in the marketing department.

To succeed at this kind of innovative work, you needed to think like an entrepreneur. However, nowadays those entrepreneurial people are forgoing the corporate world completely and starting their own ventures, or joining other startups. These individual entrepreneurs prefer to beat the big companies than work for them!

For some reason, most think this is simply due to access to new types of technology, and these people are incorrect. It's present everywhere. In fact, let's look at home-cleaning products - a category that has not seen much innovation or one would assume has not seen much innovation. The founders of Method, a new cleaning products startup created by two college students in their dorm room, is a one hundred million dollar new company and is one of the leading products in this category.

Method cleaner is new, young, hip and succeeding at giving big companies a run for their money. They even manage to recruit the best talent due to their startup nature. All of the bright scholars at the nation's top schools including Yale, Wharton, Harvard, Berkeley and so on are going to the smaller companies where they have more impact and it's perceived to be a more sexier lifestyle.

So how do big corporations compete? How do these large organizations manage to go against these small companies that are stealing their market share, their talent and essentially leaving them in the dust? Well, admitting that you have a problem is always the first step, right? Large companies have to first realize they need to infuse more entrepreneurial ways of conducting business into their organizations from the people they hire to the ways ideas are reviewed internally.

The second realization that's needed is you will not be able to actually acquire and hire entrepreneurs into your large organization. Entrepreneurs do not work well within large organizations where their ideas are not immediately taken seriously and put into action. The bureaucracy is stifling for them. The need a complete sense of autonomy to create and innovate in the way you need.

The single best way to infuse entrepreneurially thinking into your organization in order to lead disruptive ideas is to hire them on as short-term consultants or entrepreneurial guides to a project. Have them come in and give new ideas and give them a role in helping that idea come to fruition, but again - on their own terms.

About the Author

Michael is a writer on management and consumer product innovation. He believes we need to operate as the gamechanger to new business development by thinking more like small startups.