Canning capacity as ecommerce bubble breaks
What a pile up
By Alex Lennane
Fear of disruption is misplaced – as it is only innovation done by someone else.
So said Brendan McKittrick, chief technology officer of Mercator, an IT company which seems to be steaming back into the air cargo market in a big way.
Mercator itself is innovating, it says, keeping disrupters at bay. It was plugging its warehouse app at WCS last week, a clever device which is the first in a series of apps to be rolled out as part of its newly ...
Comment on this article
Miles Varghese
March 21, 2017 at 4:40 pmGreat article and an interesting perspective from Mr. McKitrick. I admire his initiative and Mercator for “reinventing themselves.” Unfortunately, if innovation was that simple everyone would be doing it.
Especially if it’s easy to “pick up a few user experience guys” which probably means the project was outsourced to another firm that does not fully understand the business. Whole departments are needed within enterprise organizations – and maintained. Good software is like gardening, it needs to constantly be evolving and as Mr. McKittrick said, needs to respond to the customer. Development is a constant task and this is how real innovation is done. The second that Mercator puts its foot off the gas, is the second that another player is coming to overtake it. (Note: I do not have full context into the company, scenario, but just speaking from an industry perspective.)
The reason why enterprise organizations fail to innovate is that they’re hindered by the overhead, red tape, and burden of getting approvals to move. Once large companies go public, they must exceed investor expectations – increasing growth rate exponentially. To constantly improve results means to constantly be innovating and finding new markets. This is nearly impossible to do for large organizations. Instead, it’s better for enterprises to acquire a startup and let it run autonomously – freeing it from the burden and operational overhead that slows down the organization. (But don’t take my word for it, take it from Clayton Christensen, tenured Harvard Business Professor and researcher in his amazing book, The Innovator’s Solution.)