How Does Competition Drives Innovation?

All of us are familiar with the phrase “Survival of the fittest”. Even though we have read about it in biology, but this phrase applies in business-ology also.

In order to continuously evolve, companies need competition. If there is no competition, evolution will stop.

After all, it’s the engineers of Bing and Yahoo who are keeping Google on its toes. Google engineers know that their one mistake means traffic diverted to Bing or Yahoo and huge business loss. If Google didn’t have any competition with them, Google would have never evolved to what it is today. Artificial intelligence, predictive input, reverse image search and whatnot. All this would have never happened. Just plain search, that too inefficient.

We all have seen the rise and fall of Orkut.

Orkut, our dear friend was the mainstream social media website in the late 2000s. Plenty of cool features including video calling, stylish designs, etc. but, then Facebook came and took all the users on its platform leading to eventual shut down of Orkut. What innovation was done by Facebook which Orkut did not have?

Answer is, having plenty of unnecessary features works in a negative way for the brand. People find it annoying. What Facebook offered was clean “wall” with simple colours and a set of “necessary” features. That’s it. Innovation does not mean adding loads of features every time. You can innovate by enriching the user experience. That’s what attracts users.

Let’s take an example of what can happen if you don’t innovate:

E-commerce vs. Brick and Mortar stores.

E-commerce is innovative. It has made our lives easier. Now, we can shop 24*7 regardless of where we are. Whereas, in brick and mortar shops, they have fixed timings and not so much use of technology. Innovation is an alien word for them.

As a result, we can see the rise of e-commerce and the decline of brick and mortar shops.

E-commerce is rising new heights day-by-day whereas brick and mortar shops are shutting down or are struggling to survive.

Truth is, competition is necessary for continuous growth. No competition, no growth.

Some of the biggest rivals are –

UBER vs. Lyft (in USA)

UBER vs. OLA cabs (in India)

Flipkart vs. Amazon

Google vs. Yahoo!

Netflix vs. Amazon Prime

Samsung vs. Apple

These rivals have led to explosive growth in their respective industries. We can see innovation on a daily basis, just to make superior products and win the customer. Take a moment to thank all these companies due to which we see innovation.

In the end, remember,

“If you don’t innovate, you are out of the race”