Jory points us to Strategy + Business’s article titled The Power of Dumb Ideas.
Randall Rothenberg, the article’s author, stresses that an idea does not need to be new to be effective. Here is the quote that stuck with me:
“It’s Your Context That Counts. The big idea doesn’t have to be the brand-new idea. Something common to the word at large may be very new to you and your organization. This is more than enough to galvanize the team, create faith, and build the world’s greatest marketing department.”
Most successful entrepreneurs are great re-arrangers. They take something that has been useful somewhere else and rig it so that it is groundbreaking and disruptive to a completely different industry.
An example of this is the demand forecasting model that Marriott employs in its hotels. This system was originally modeled after something that airlines have been using for years. Marriott began using this system about a decade ago and it has allowed them to control demand for an entire geographic region. If one hotel is close to selling out the pricing is automatically adjusted in real time for all other Marriott hotels in that part of the country. Marriott can literally control the pricing of their product down to the last room available in a huge market.
Airlines started doing this back in the 1980s.
This type of system is still relatively new and remarkable to some hotel companies. I know of one very large company that is still doing this manually and missing out on huge opportunity.
My takeaway from the S+B article is not that old (or dumb) idea is great. It is that an old idea (or dumb idea) in one industry may be a new (and remarkable) to another industry.
Comments