If you speak to most business leaders, the major obsession is around gaining market share, thus growing both the top line and the bottom line. Business leaders will often pursue different strategies. Some pursue differentiation/customer focused strategies while others pursue cost-leadership, being the most cost-efficient players in the market.
Regardless of the different routes all the firms take, it all ends in innovation. None of the routes works without a stop by the innovation station. Because let’s face it, to have an efficient and effective process that enables you to peel off waste, that’s going to take innovation. To have the most differentiated product in the market, that’s going to take innovation.
If you think about the people management strategies and everything around growing human capital, that still requires innovation. If strategy is about being either better, cheaper or faster, the only way this is done is through innovation.
Precisely, businesses must be in a continuous act of ‘Creative Destruction’ as laid out by Austrian Economist, Joseph Schumpeter. Businesses must be continuously destroying their old ways of work and building up new ways of work. These new ways could be better, they could be cheaper, or they could be faster. Thus, all organizations must be priming for innovation. Nothing but continuous innovation. You innovate or you watch competition take you for a home run.