Ensuring your company can evolve is a central challenge for many legacy business owners and operators. Unfortunately, start-ups are constantly bursting onto the scene with new solutions that quickly overwhelm those unprepared to evolve and innovate. 

The Need to Innovate

In recent years, new players have entered markets with new technology and solutions that completely upset the conventional business model of established companies. The reality of modern business is the constant state of transformation and innovation. Businesses that do not embrace this reality will be left behind. 

More than ever, customers expect convenience and cutting-edge solutions. Companies that fail to meet this will lose out, and their long-term survival will be seriously doubtful. Therefore, ensuring your company can evolve is central to meeting the constant competition from new companies pushing the envelope. Even if your industry has high compliance standards that make innovation daunting, the need to evolve is critical. 

Companies that succeed now cannot fall into the trap of avoiding innovation because of current success. With the rate of innovation, new technology will likely come along that completely upsets the current business model. Investing in innovation is central to ensuring your company can evolve. Current success does guarantee success in the future. 

Innovations in coding, AI, and data access make the costs of innovation lower than ever before. This decreased cost will speed up the already incredible rate of innovation. While this may sound like a nightmare for an established legacy company, this is actually an opportunity. The cost of investing in innovating yourself is lower than ever before. 

Start-Ups vs. Legacy Companies 

Start-ups benefit tremendously from their lean structure, which makes creative solutions easy to come by. However, scaling and properly implementing their innovations into real market solutions is where start-ups need help. 

Legacy companies have enormous scalability advantages and already have existing marketing solutions that innovations can build off. Finding this balance between the start-up mentality for innovation and an established one is valuable for ensuring your company can evolve. Established companies with significantly more resources and market share than new players can claim a much larger market share than new competitors. 

Evolving as a Legacy Company

Embracing Data

More data than ever is available to companies. This empowers companies to efficiently analyze their business model in depth and find opportunities for improvement. Embracing and reacting to this unprecedented level of data in real-time is essential to ensuring your company can evolve.

Legacy companies can use their new data capabilities to evolve their services to fit their existing customers' needs better. This has two huge benefits of greater customer retention and increased customer referrals. 

Established companies have existing brand recognition and trust built among customers. However, these companies must be responsible for customer data so that customers continue to trust the services of legacy companies. 

Take Advantage of Legacy Systems

Your company should use your existing place in the market to push your expansion into the digital ecosystem. Embarrassing new digital solutions means more than just making existing operations more efficient but using the data to create new revenue streams. That is the beauty of crafting a digital ecosystem for your company, as you can find new paths forward that were not available before. 

Small Team Model

Explore creating small teams that can work independently at the company's edge to innovate. By giving these teams the resources to innovate, test, and experiment, your company can create your own sort of start-ups that develop cutting-edge solutions for you rather than the competition. 

You must provide a structure to allow these teams to coordinate with each other so they are not conflicting with each other and can access the resources they need from the larger company without disrupting normal business operations. Implement business-wide information standards so that these innovations from the small teams can be easily transmitted across the entire company. Your company must be clear about where it is willing to spend money on innovations, and this provides small teams with clear objectives. 

Numerous legacy companies in industries around the world have successfully leveraged this small team to increase their in-house innovation dramatically. These demonstrate that ensuring your company can evolve is a lot easier with the small team innovation model. 

Change the Culture

Companies must explore fostering a culture of innovation that can coexist with the existing legacy system. This way, the current system can continue serving existing customers while the company explores how to improve. Creating a learning culture and constantly seeking improvement are central to ensuring your company can evolve. 

To make innovation easy and effective, your company must encourage collaboration and diverse input sources. Limiting innovation to a small handful of people cuts out the innovative potential of most of your company. Whether the idea comes from the C-suite or a warehouse worker, your company should embrace any good idea. Likewise, your employees should feel they can impact and change the company meaningfully with their ideas. Finally, you must not be afraid to seek outside help learning about new solutions your existing team is unfamiliar with.

Communication

Communication is invaluable to ensuring your company can evolve. This ensures that everyone knows the company's direction and can adapt solutions that meet these goals. Your company should also ensure that your mission and values are clear. This ensures that all new innovations align with the company's core values and that the company can balance innovation and its trusted legacy. 

Innovation efforts must be directed at solving business outcomes. Nothing is gained from developing a technology that does not solve a problem for your business. Furthermore, communicating the mission and expectations of the company reduces the chances of unproductive innovations. 

Experiment

Experimenting and being willing to risk failure are essential to evolving and innovating. This allows your company to fine-tune any new solutions and make them more useful for you and your customers. Additionally, as an established company, you can better handle failure than a start-up as long as the innovative process does not take away from your regular business operations. A few small failures can lead to profound innovations that can completely change your company's future.