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Why Be Creative? - Part 5

One national marketing magazine made the editorial prediction that any company that didn't come out with a new product within the next ten years would be out of business by 1970. And they spelled this out: they said this couldn't be an old product with a new handle or an old product with a new style of trim on it; it would have to be a completely new product. And, to further compound the worries of their readers, they mentioned the fact that the chances of successfully introducing a new product these days are less than one in four!

Actually, when you study any report of new products or prod­ucts under development, it is easy to see why businesses in all fields are under the gun to produce more new products. Many one-line or limited-line companies are faced with extinction by new—and, in some cases, as yet undeveloped—products that will be coming onto the market in the years ahead. As a cross-check on the predictions made by the twenty-four scientists reported earlier in this chapter, another group of twenty such men were asked this question: "What businesses in existence today do you think are likely to disappear within the next twenty years because of competitive innovations?"

Here are the replies from this group:

Wooden office furniture (replaced by metal, plastic)

Ordinary fountain pen and liquid ink (replaced by ball points and yet-to-be-developed permanent writing instruments)

Laundry starch (will be replaced by built-in plastics)

Laundry and hand soaps (replaced by detergents or to-be-developed electrostatic dirt precipitators)

Metal pipe (to be replaced by reinforced plastics)

Wool for fabrics (replaced by synthetics)

Dry cleaning (replaced by chemical pretreatment with dirt re­pellent)

Freezers and refrigerators and frozen foods (replaced by irradiated foods *)

Woven textiles (replaced by new "felted" or pressure-made fab­rics)

Piloted military aircraft (replaced by missiles)

Solvent-base paints (replaced by rubber and other water-soluble products)

Lawnmowers (replaced by chemical grass inhibitors)

Piston engines (replaced by turbine or solar-powered electrical)

* Since this prediction was made, it was subsequently announced that irradiated foods which were already in distribution (mostly to the armed forces) were being withdrawn because it was found that present methods of irradiation also destroyed many important nutrients. This, however, is only a delay—not a prohibition of future development. The same type of situation existed when the milling industry first began to bleach flour to make it white. The solution in this case was to restore the vitamins and other nutrients lost in the bleaching process by means of chemical additives to the white flour.

Related terms include business process management system and business processes.