Innovation: It’s a not a dog-eat-dog world
Sarah Jons 
Simon’s words are both profound and a little bleak. In the realm of business, people often say that it’s a cut-throat ordog-eat-dog world.
Innovation is not born from the dream. Innovation is born from the struggle.
–Simon Sinek
Simon’s words are both profound and a little bleak. In the realm of business, people often say that it’s a cut-throat ordog-eat-dog world. The phrase survival of the fittest, which was not used (first) by Darwin but by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, is widely misunderstood. For most people the phrase survival of the fittest evokes a picture of nature red in tooth and claw, a brutal struggle, which the strongest individuals are destined to win. Survival of the fittest has been used (in society and business) to justify greed, selfish behaviours and everyone for themselves attitudes. The ‘fittest’ can actually mean be the most loving and selfless, not the most aggressive and violent In fact, in biological terms the fittest can mean the cleverest, the best camouflaged, the most attractive – or even the nicest. In any case, what happens in nature does not justify people behaving in the same way.
On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua in New York. However shortly after he began Douglass sounded a foretelling of the coming Civil War when he uttered the most quoted sentences of all of his public orations,
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Struggle can be defined in many ways and has several meaning:
- to try hard to do, to achieve, or deal with something that is difficult or that causes problems
- to move with difficulty or with great effort
- to try to move yourself, an object, etc., by making a lot of effort
The struggle to survive is seen throughout evolution and natural selection. Natural selection is simply a description of what happens in the living world. It does not tell us how we should behave. The concept of struggle for existence is of competition or battle for resources needed to live.
Maybe at last, we are witnessing a shift in mentality and behaviour from the past approach of dog-eat-dog competition between businesses, business units, and employees to the future approach of collaboration across multi-functional teams, departments, organisations and business ecosystems: interconnectedness rather than separateness, collaboration rather than competition.
Traditionally start-up firms have faced a real struggle when challenging established businesses with a well-financed parent company. When James Dyson began work on his bag-less vacuum cleaner in 1978, the last thing on his mind was how Hoover would react to his muscling in on their market. Five years and 5,127 prototypes later, the Dyson G-Force Dual Cyclone arrived and revolutionised the vacuum cleaner market. Hoover, once the dominant US brand, had become complacent and failed to innovate. Dyson – now Sir James Dyson – could see a gap in the market for a top-of-the-range product that went about its job in a completely different and, arguably, more effective way. His gamble paid off handsomely.
He established his product in Japan, then in Europe and by 2007 Dyson was the market leader by revenue in the US – Hoover’s own backyard. But it was a gamble. Dyson seemingly blanked out the possibility that Hoover could use the financial muscle of its parent group, Whirlpool, to blow him out of the water. It wasn’t until 1999 that Hoover made its move. It tried to imitate a Dyson and Sir James went to court to protect his invention and he won decisively.
I am pleased that the shift from struggling companies which are seen as the breading place for innovation to one where we could have collaboration and synergy. It is a myth that nature has evolved over millions of years of combat and competitive struggle; more it is that evolution is down to networking and partnerships.
Of course there has been, and always will be competition in life, yet evolution benefits far more from collaboration than it does from competition. What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life. Complex cells evolved from cooperating simple cells.
Multicellular organisms are made up of cooperating complex cells. Super-organisms such as bee or ant colonies consist of cooperating individuals. So does our business environment. Collaboration encourages the transcending of traditional boundaries used to separate teams, departments, business units and organisations; it interconnects artificial separations in business, encouraging sharing, creativity, empowerment and innovation. Innovation is something that is key to this world; it is what has allowed humanity to excel to limits far beyond anyone’s imagination. It is what makes the impossible, possible and it is what constantly gets us wanting to improve the world even more.
All companies are part of the greater economy, which includes your competitors, customers, suppliers and prospects. And many businesses look at the ecosystem as a zero-sum game where growth in their company will result in a decline in their competitors and vice versa. In reality that is rarely the case. Successful transformation requires courage, not fear; it is not for the faint-hearted. The more we understand and explore our own business environments and wider business ecosystems (as well as our own inner motives and values) the more we find pathways for success. The encouragement we need is for learning through doing, growth through experience, success through failure.
Innovation (even in it’s over used format) is not simply about building the future; innovation is about solving problems in the present. Looking around us in nature and human nature, we find enablers to assist us to survive and thrive. Innovation is not bred in places that are too comfortable or too easy. It is brought upon when someone taps into the brilliance of their own mind and thinks what currently exists sucks and wants to improve it — so they go out there and create it.
Being innovative is not a trait that everyone has, but the issue is many of the people who do have it decide not to do anything with it. Action is what sparks innovation, it’s not being afraid to use trial and error to figure it out because at some point you will fail, but eventually you will figure it out. Improving quality standards (Excellence, always) and customer awareness will improve all companies competing in that industry ecosystem. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats and this rings true in the world of business.
In nature, which has been dealing with dynamic change for some 4 billion years, we find it is the species that collaborate and interconnect more with their respective ecosystems that are more resilient to changes in their environment. The ecosystem they live in becomes more resilient the more interconnected the stakeholders are within that ecosystem.
The same is true for business.
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