There are hundreds and thousands of success stories that tell you how following gut instinct worked against all odds for the entrepreneurs. In all those stories, you will find how entrepreneurs risked their money to make their idea work, and how they have transformed the industry.
From Henry Ford, who to counter the falling demand of his cars, doubled his employees’ wages to the Boeing’s Bill Allen, who convinced his board to risk $16 million on commercial jet. Long back, when Uber introduced dynamic pricing, the move draws the ire of the passengers, but now the pricing policy is a widely accepted notion.
Is it just the instinct of the top brains of these companies that their idea clicked?
How they accurately analyzed what is right for their business, stuck to it and claimed success?
There is an integral factor that we are missing here and that is time. And just like the Victor Hugo has said, “There is nothing more powerful than the idea whose time has come”, there are many companies that transformed the ideas into reality at the right time and those that didn’t able to do so, vanished without trace.
The time is important because the world need to be ready to accept the idea. The greatest example in this case would be the life and writings of the writers. Popular writers like Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and Mary Shelley struggled to find a space among readers.
Their works were never appreciated during their lifetime, but today they are recognized as Masterpieces.
Unlike the writers, business leaders have to not just move forward with their ideologies but within a limited timeframe have to prove to the world their idea is profitable for the business, revolutionary for the industry, and convenient for the customers.
Here is the list of four revolutionary ideas, concepts, and companies that changed the face of the market in their respective domains.
eCommerce in Retail Industry
Who would have that an online book store will become the face of the modern retail industry, and the founder and CEO of amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, who began the company in his garage, one day will be the richest man on the earth.
This American online marketing company completely swept the world with its ecommerce services by beginning a trend that is now the current of buying and selling any product in the market.
The Internet enterprise he envisioned and was initially an online bookstore, which laid the foundation of ecommerce.
In an interview with Forbes, Bezos says that traditional corporate hierarchy has such a long chain that it can kill the idea, which is the reason why “nimble startups so easily slaughter hidebound dinosaurs”.
He further adds that every employee of his has a door to share their interesting idea. And when it comes to implementing business ideas that change the course of the company, he measures the idea on the three scales:
- Originality: A differentiated idea with no scope of “me too” offering.
- Scale: Investing in ideas that in future can no longer be “small” given the company’s ability to invest in large scale projects.
- ROI: Generating “good returns on capital.”
Web-based Search Engine
The fact is that even to know how Google has changed your life, you’ll Google it, and this is how this largest search engine has impacted our lives.
This 20-year-old company is a modern library that directs you to the right source to get the required information.
From making search ubiquitous with Google to transforming the way we watch videos through the most popular video-sharing site YouTube, Google is about platforms that accessible to millions.
There are two big ideas that helped founders make what Google is today:
First, citation-based ranking system to rate the quality of articles.
Second, search result unaffected by business needs.
It wasn’t that there were no search engines before Google, but it was these two ideas strengthened the foundation of Google.
IoT in Manufacturing Industry
According to the predictions of Gartner Inc., by 2020 there will be more than 20.4 billion IoT devices. The idea of connecting devices to monitor development cycle, predict maintenance, and manage warehouses and inventories is truly revolutionary.
IoT empowers the machine learning capabilities and identify shortcoming and faults and helps in analyzing the effectiveness and accuracy of the system to streamline operations.
With advanced IoT applications, manufacturers can manage supply chain efficiently on a global scale and create self-independent systems for production and equipment failure issues.
Based on a post by IBM, the Coke machine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was the world’s first IoT based device with the capability to report its content through a network.
In the words of Kevin Ashton, who coined the term Internet of Things, “we must never allow our vision to shrink”. As an Executive Director of Auto-ID Center, he envisioned the needs to empower computers to observe, identify, and understand the world through RFID and Sensor technology.
With the introduction of RFID and Sensor technology by Siemens, a German company headquartered in Berlin and the largest manufacturing company in Europe, IoT got its shape, which is today a revolutionary concept with the power to change the world.
Mobile Applications in Service Industry
There is a mobile application for everything you do, from health to wealth. But at one place, where mobile applications completely dominate is service sector.
Service-based applications for in-house employees to customers help in completing the process rapidly and efficiently.
Each app comes with a dedicated functionality to perform a task and contribute to the process while eliminating paperwork and maintaining the high level of accuracy.
If we try to trace the history of Mobile Applications, it can be clearly figured out that even calendar and calculator is also a mobile application.
It was IBM in 1993 that created Smartphone with apps like world clock, contact book, calendar, and others. BlackBerry Limited, earlier known as Research in Motion Limited (RIM) that introduced the concept of wireless email.
However, BlackBerry has now a limited market, though it was a pioneer of the wireless email concept.
Picking the Best Ideas and Concepts for Your Business
In business, it is necessary to keep developing new ideas, picking the best, and applying it to grow further. Simultaneously, it is also essential to pick the best ideas and concepts for your business from the market, before it gets too late.
A quick example could be reconstructing your brick and mortar shop on the Internet, yes, an e-commerce website, or creating a mobile application to woo your customers or enterprise application to streamline your business processes.
Creating a customized mobile app does consume much time, provided your mobile app development company is a technology expert and reliable.
You can use an IoT app to perform real-time monitoring of your business process.
Understanding the ranking system of Google or say SEO, you can increase your brand visibility and generate more business.
And while do so, always remember the quote by Lev S. Vygotsky “Through others we become ourselves.”
4 Innovative Business Ideas and Concepts that Changed the World,