Social Innovation In Retail

Innovation across all aspects of the retail marketplace from shopping methods to the partner services support is driving the retail transformation and social interaction is driving this innovation.  Social interaction driving the innovation change to drive social innovation in the retail marketplace that is driving the disruption in the retail marketplace. The social innovation drive is bringing about a significant change in the marketplace by changing the control from centralized and driven by a small number of key players to a decentralized control mechanisms that are driven by the social interaction of the consumers with a wide range of partners that support the marketplace.  This decentralized control mechanism is driven by consumers and supported by point solution innovators in the retail marketplace to experiment with support of the changing consumer lifestyle.

Consumers have been going through a series of innovations in their shopping and purchasing over the years and now we have reach a point of technology capabilities and network capabilities that allows and more importantly, encourages the innovation to increase in velocity.  We have reached a point of convergence in the retail market with technology, consumer demands and retail partner collaboration where the market is now forcing retailers to participate in this social collaborative network. There is really no choice for retailers in this current environment and the retailers must engage in the network in order to prosper.  We are seeing the results of this across the marketplace in the reactions and plans, or lack of plans, from major retailers in their efforts to expand and integrate the consumer shopping experience seamlessly across all channels.

This integration of the consumer shopping experience across all channels provides the foundation for the social collaborative innovation in the marketplace.  I find it especially fascinating that you can see the difference in results between major large legacy retailers that have embraced the consumer demands from the retailers that have not embraced the consumer demands in the marketplace.  Forward looking retailers have embraced the consumer demands and the collaborative network capabilities and demands that buffeted the market over the recent years. These forward looking retailers have stepped up to understand and incorporate the capabilities into their practices and these are the retailers (I’m thinking of Macy’s and Walmart as key examples) that are preparing for the future innovations in the market and these are the retailers that will also drive the partners to view and understand and incorporate the capabilities to support the collaborative network to navigate and embrace the innovation.

Retailers really have a choice in this matter and the choice unfortunately is to embrace and drive the innovation in the market to survive, or to hold back and wait for the dust to settle and potentially fail.  The key force now is the velocity of the innovation that is driving the retail marketplace. In the past, retailers have been divided between innovators and large major retailers and the large retailers waited for the dust to settle and history to select the innovations that were accepted by consumers in order to change.  Unfortunately now because of the velocity of the innovation the large retailers no longer have an option to wait for the dust to settle, instead these retailers must develop the framework that allows efficient and quick change capabilities to incorporate new innovations and drop innovation that fails.