Discover how to make innovation really work for your business – and create wealth as a result –with author Douglas Kruger’s series of practical articles.
Take the off-ramp near Soweto, stop at just the right place, and you will meet a man who runs an unusual food stall. It is not part of any retail chain you have ever heard, of and there is nothing quite like it anywhere in the world. You start the process by ordering a bunny chow. His interpretation of this meat-within-a-bread loaf concept includes a mix of polony, eggs, tomato sauce, and assorted odds and ends, the nature of which varies from day to day. Best not to ask too many questions.
Once you’ve got your bunny chow, you can pay and walk off. Or, if you ask nicely you can have it run over. Choose the latter, and the man will wrap it in wax paper, hurl it onto the highway, and wait for a truck to drive over it at 120kph. Once retrieved, the opened package will be transformed. It will now be a colourful mush of mingled parts–eggs dripping with sauce, polony interspersed with shredded bread; making kaleidoscopic patterns that defy description. The packaging will have tyre marks across it.
As you leave the roadside stall, take a moment to reflect on the vast number of principles you can learn from this man. His business is the definition of what I term a ‘unique signature’. He is a fascinating study in how innovation is not necessarily driven by the classic solve-a-problem approach which economics-minded textbooks and professors would have us believe is the primary driver of innovation. What ‘problem’does running over a defenseless polony actually solve?
Click here to read the full story in the digital magazine, Issue 13, page 14.
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