Innovate or DIE

Innovation is relative to a context, in which a "thing" (i.e. tool, practice, method) is new for a group of individuals, who adopted it successfully. So, to innovate, the top priority is the change management (which seems to be still badly considered by the management). Regarding "Innovate or DIE", before focusing on the market, the "outside" and the "unknown", perhaps trying to do it FIRST INSIDE the organization (towards "internal clients", any) ? With simple things (as Innovation has nothing to do with complexity or hype brand new cutting edge blabla thing :) ) If you succeed to do it well internally (or to fight against the barriers to apply it), being innovative towards "external customers" will become much more easy, and fare more : it could be a real milestone that can trigger a big revolution in your business and the way you address your client issues and needs !

Please note how rich are each comments below

I would say evolve & not necessary innovate, because when you already have a product in the market what you need is a sustainable constant growth and development to meet market trends & meet customers expectations.

innovation is overhyped, of course — sometimes our creativity better serves the greater good by simply being more 'appropriate' and elegant in sociology and psychology, sometimes to better understand something that is successful we study its opposite, right? for instance, to understand how people read we oftentimes delve into case studies about dyslexia and other forms of human reading challenges that block success in that spirit i would like to encourage us all to look at where innovation fails, and ... where business ventures fail from my own personal experience working at a myriad of very different organizations i've seen several companies and initiatives fail due to: lack of organization; absence of thoughtful planning and 'set up'; misunderstanding regarding the target audience or user base i can think of a specific example where on a daily basis it was more than evident to me that all of our design and development efforts for improving a rather successful start-up product were simply being made without any consideration for our real audience — the CTO and co-founder of the business would come in and bully the team during our scrum sessions and often lead with conflicting direction and vision from day to day — a rather confounded and confusing set of new initiatives to bring the product to the 'next level' just didn't even make basic sense with the very nature of our product, which focused on peer-to-peer sharing for consumers and small businesses at the end of the day we were designing for one person — and that person was the CTO he not only refused to take any thoughtfully professional questions about the cloudy thought behind his constantly morphing vision, but he seemed to take offense to the kind of amazing insight being offered to him by his employees he wasn't listening he wasn't listening to his employees he wasn't listening to his management and he therefore in NO way whatsoever probably even considered asking his customers for what THEY might want from the next version releases of the product and guess what happened the company went away and it went away pretty quickly, too due to the missteps of the team in our design and development efforts the power of the brand and its overall story were diluted and, quite frankly, getting more and more confusing unwanted new features were added to the product, and those unwanted features got in the way of the core functionality that our user bases absolutely LOVED prior to the product's evolution as less and less people signed up for the service and as numbers decreased, the board lost confidence in the CTO and the start-up's leadership and direction and therefore did not help with the next round of funding thereby forcing the company to shut its doors in a matter of a month or 2 i learned huge lessons from this experience the team there was fantastic — i usually LOVE the teams at these start-up organizations as they thrive on new ideas and incredible 'can do' energy unfortunately, from my perspective, the CTO did not act responsibly and basically jeopardized &/or sacrificed: the company; his employees; and his reputation due to his own stubborn and ignorant pride and a lack of understand of the full business ecosystem involved, which ... by the way ... includes the customers and what THEY want, too