Innovating Toward Sustainability

Alvin Toffler once said that we cannot predict the future. Similarly, we can borrow a dictum from the illustrious co-founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, which says that “the only thing that we can truly plan for is change: An axiom that goes hand in hand with the necessity of innovation”. Change is the foundation on which company survival is built and businesses today have to be agile, reactive and creative in order to remold and rebuild their enterprises in response to and anticipation of an unstable environment, to develop new product and service offerings and to foster transformative progression in a volatile and fiercely competitive globalized environment. A number of academic studies have concluded that volatility at the firm level increased somewhere between two and four-folds from the 1970s to the 1990s. In today's markets, nothing stands still for long; product life cycles are perpetually decreasing today and even the most successful firms may be supplanted by better, faster, savvier entrants to tomorrow's markets. Indeed, Schumpeterian theory rings true: The assertion that competitive advantage will become increasingly more difficult to sustain. Today, the difficulty in maintaining competitive advantage has become so convoluted that it has fallen into the realm of “hypercompetition” and this is a phenomenon that is seen across a broad range of industries…