Velocity Of Social Innovation In Retail

The velocity of change in the retail marketplace has been increasing for quite some time and this velocity will increase with the increased social innovation that is driven by consumers in their interactions. The social innovation has been embraced by consumers to implement changes and new capabilities using social networking capabilities in their retail shopping. Consumers have incorporated specialty service providers and specialty omni market retailers in their shopping and purchasing practices along with their social networking to meet the demands of their shopping and purchasing changes that are in turn have been embraced to support their changing lifestyles.  This combination of social network and the omni market network and network partners come together now to encourage a collaborative approach across the retail marketplace to support the velocity of the social innovation driven by consumers.

While retailers have been building out their operational capabilities to support purchasing and delivery demands across the entire omni market network, consumers have been utilizing their social network to develop new methods to shop and then utilize the purchasing and delivery capabilities developed by retailers in new and innovative ways.  Consumers are introducing increasing amounts of innovation through the use of specialty providers of services and even products to the omni marketplace to mold and specialize their capabilities by utilizing these social network capabilities to enhance the purchasing and delivery capabilities of the omni marketplace.

There have been a couple of developments in both the consumer social network capabilities and the retail omni marketplace that have helped to increase the velocity of social innovation; the introduction and expansion the specialty providers in both the retailer and the social network and the collaborative capabilities that have been growing and improving.  These capabilities are combined then utilizing the improved wireless networking capabilities and the growth and expansion of unlimited data on all of the wireless networks to bring about a discontinuous social innovation in the retail marketplace that is both increasing in velocity and the depth and span of the marketplace. In other words, consumers and speciality service and product providers are coming together now in ways that increase not only the level and amount of social innovation and also an increased velocity of social innovation.

The challenge that large retailers are facing now is the embrace of the social shopping capabilities and expansion of the retailer collaborative network to link and collaborate with the social shopping and specialty service and product suppliers that support eh social network to link the retailer into the expanding consumer capabilities. The challenge for these large retailers is their need to change to a collaborative interaction that enhances the social retail network of shopping, purchasing and delivery of products to consumers in this expanded collaborative network environment and then to plug into the social innovation of this network.  The challenge is the combination of the consumer social networking with the retailer supply chain purchase and delivery network to support the social innovation.

The forward thinking large retailers are beginning to realize there are many forces coming together in the larger omni marketplace creating a new reality where the retailer’s success and survival is based on their ability to integrate and become part of this network.  The benefit of the network to the retail marketplace is the ability to sense and respond to the velocity of innovation introduced by consumer demands along with the cost of this support being born by the network and not just by the retailer. This is the future of the retail marketplace and really the only way that retailers can hope to keep up with the velocity of change in the marketplace.