How often should you innovate your products?
Innovation is greatly overrated and pushed by people who lack an understanding of how innovation works and its risks. First of all, I don’t think companies should be innovative but focus on being adaptive. Innovation means creating the new and novel, but adaptation means changing to meet circumstances. Yes, that change can mean innovation, but it is not required.
Now with innovation, there are costs and risks. It takes effort to create new products and many of them will fail. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, have departments just creating new products. Most will not go anywhere. By most, I mean 99%+ of the products. Because of their economies of scale and high profits, this is possible. Smaller companies don’t have the resources to be doing this.
Yes, innovation can mean a huge reward, but no one remembers the companies that were first, only the companies that were successful. That is, the adaptive companies that copied the innovators, then use their money and market power to succeed.
So basically, you need to be adaptive. You need to watch both your own product or service's success as well as monitor the market. Then you need to change your options, like product offerings and prices to match the market. This might not involve any innovation at all. If the restaurant and bar are offering chicken wings, well you can too. If the nearby shops start going on sale, you should have a sale as well. If blue is the hot fashion color of fall 2020, then you should think of focusing your fashion on blue too.
There is nothing wrong with innovation, but it is always sold as easy money. They are telling you to always be creating, but then they are selling creative consultation services, so they plan to profit from what is most likely to be your misery