Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze

Innovate or die, how many times have we heard this phrase? There are many examples of businesses that did not evolve and fell by the wayside, such as Blockbuster and Kodak. For them, organizations need to be disruptive, innovate and make their companies evolve, the problem is often fear and living only in the present, without thinking about the future and that at any moment a company can come to occupy the market.

“To be disruptive you have to realize what we are doing wrong”, mentioned Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze during his participation in the World Business Forum (WOBI) 2022.

He explained that organizations need to see that there is a larger market and adopt a new vision, knowing that the opportunity to create a revolution is much greater than the threat.

For the entrepreneur, price is the biggest disruptor. “How many of you pay for an email?” I ask the public, “In the beginning Google charged for the service, but people didn’t use it, since it’s free, more people use it”, so the company can offer other services and be a market leader.

How to create a corporate innovation strategy?

Innovating in organizations is not always easy, often because of the fear of not knowing how long the journey will take and the costs it will entail, also because there are egos between areas that prevent growth.

However, innovation is imminent in an organization that seeks to grow, so companies need ask yourself two questions mininas twice a year: what is going to make us irrelevant in a few years? And what assets do we have now that if we don’t use them differently we won’t be disruptive?

Although they seem like simple questions to solve, many organizations do not know their assets and the capacity they have to innovate, in the face of this it is necessary to carry out an internal analysis and change the DNA, in order to “be ready for transformation.

Levine details that the change has to come from above, from the leader, who must pay attention to those people who are not satisfied, who do not accept no for an answer, because they are the ones who are going to make a change in the company.

It also highlights that if companies do not want to innovate, can invest in a company or startup, shortening the trial and error time and then putting the product or service on sale.

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Levine recommends companies and entrepreneurs “fall in love with the problemnot the solution”, because when you find a problem the next step is to create a solution that has value for people, this way it will be easier to adapt the product to the market and its probability of success will be much greater.