Changing the game: How innovation transforms industries and creates breakthrough success (original) (raw)

When Billy Beane began preparing for the 2002 Major League Baseball (MLB) season as the general manager of the small-market Oakland Athletics, he made two critical choices.

First, he needed to rebuild his team with completely different players than the year before. Larger teams with deeper pockets, like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, had paid big money for his best players. The team now had no first baseman, relied on a veteran backup to play centre field, and needed a new closing pitcher. Beane had to redesign the team from the ground up.
The second choice ended up being even more important.

Beane was frustrated with how MLB teams selected players. Unlike many league executives, he had seen the limitations of the selection process as a player.

As a highly touted high school prospect, Beane chose to sign with the New York Mets instead of taking a full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Team scouts, who spent hours at the Beane family’s kitchen table, assured Billy and his parents of his future success in professional baseball. But he didn’t succeed, playing for five different teams in six seasons before retiring to pursue a career in management.

Beane knew that even when scouts were confident, they couldn’t really know. They were all making the same guesses on the same set of players for almost exactly the same set of reasons.

He looked at his team in Oakland. They still had their star shortstop, Miguel Tejada, third baseman Eric Chavez, and a powerful rotation of starting pitchers. But the gaps at first base, the outfield, and in the bullpen seemed insurmountable, especially considering his budget limitations.

Unlike other professional sports leagues, Major League Baseball does not impose a salary cap on its teams, resulting in a significant disparity between what the richest and poorest teams can afford to pay their players. For example, in 2002, the New York Yankees boasted a payroll of 125,928,583,whiletheOaklandA’sspentjust125,928,583, while the Oakland A’s spent just 125,928,583,whiletheOaklandA’sspentjust39,679,746 to field their team.

Baseball on black blackground

Billy Beane knew that if they picked their team conventionally and relied on their scouts to select players subjectively, they would almost certainly lose to the teams who could pay more for highly touted prospects or proven players.

Beane had failed out of the league once before and was not going to accept another loss easily. His second choice was that his team would be constructed based on overlooked data and statistics; they called it Moneyball.

The team won 20 straight games, dominated their division, and posted the second-best regular season record in baseball.

Sometimes, you need to change the conversation

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1996, many people didn’t understand the company’s path to growth.

Microsoft held a staggering 90% share of the operating system market at the time, while Intel reigned over the processor domain. Given this landscape, how could Apple stand a chance?

Jobs’ answer to that question is why Apple is now the most valuable company in the world.

He did not say, “We are going to create a better operating system.”
He did not say, “We are going to create better hardware.”

Like Billy Beane, he said: “We are going to re-work and scrutinise everything we do until the conditions are right to change the subject.” And that’s exactly what they did.

Year after year, Apple pushed their technology forward until it was not just better but radically different. Finally, in 2001, they released the iPod and changed the subject from MP3 players and CDs to “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

Golden apple on a black background created with Generative AI technology

They released the iPhone in 2007 and changed the subject from email access on your Blackberry to a device that combined the power of an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator — all built on top of a global app store.

Apple is the Apple we know today because they don’t build incrementally better products. They build products that cannot be reconciled with what came before. They give us a new lens to evaluate our problems and the solutions they provide. Apple completely changes the subject, and the results are impossible to ignore.

From guesswork to guidance: Reimagining pest control

Nancy Schellhorn launched RapidAIM in 2018, knowing that the pest control industry needed a conversation change. She knew we were dumping an astounding 485,000 tonnes of insecticide on our planet every year, having witnessed an eight-fold increase in chemical usage in her lifetime. Yet, more than 30% of crops were still being lost to pests because only 0.01% of pesticides were reaching their intended targets.

It was, she thought, the agronomic equivalent of walking through a maze blindfolded, hoping to somehow find the exit.

Such a hit-or-miss approach had long been an accepted, albeit unsatisfactory, part of farming. But Schellhorn, who holds a PhD in entomology, believed she had developed a better way – something called Digital Crop Protection. It was a real-time pest detection system combining cutting-edge hardware and software with advanced biomimicry and AI pattern recognition to identify pests when they set foot on a farm.

The system lured insects such as fruit flies into an enclosed trap, where sensors could detect them through their movements. The sensors sent this data to the cloud, alerting producers to the pests’ presence and allowing them to take hyper-targeted action. The technology has been shown to reduce the cost of managing fruit fly outbreaks by 35%.

A fruit fly on a blue background with a red spot on its back end.

Instead of just trying to tweak pesticide application, the team at RapidAIM has changed the conversation with Digital Pest Control.

Most of us tend to think of competition as an exercise in binary choice: “Is this product better or worse than other solutions on the market today?”

That’s why most of our customer presentations are front-loaded with features and functions, proving that our widget is better than the other widgets out there.

We assume that given enough time or attention, the best product always wins. That the proverbial cream will always rise to the top. But the stories of Billy Beane, Steve Jobs, and Nancy Schellhorn remind us that sometimes we find ourselves in a competitive environment where the answer is not to pedal faster than others. Sometimes, you need to pedal in a completely different direction.

Redefining vision: From comparison to breakthrough in business strategy

There is a set of business strategies focused on establishing us as superior to the competition and a set focused on establishing our company as distinctly different from the competition. The reason breakthrough ideas succeed is that the latter is every bit as important as the former.

Do you have to build a great product that your customer finds meaningfully useful? Absolutely. Do you have to build a company that is uniquely positioned to solve a particular problem? Of course. But neither of these is sufficient to create a lasting, valuable breakthrough.

To do that, you must also provide your customers with a new lens through which to view their problem. You must establish a new category that changes the tone and tenor of the conversations happening in the industry and creates favorable conditions for your solution.

It’s time to make something different. It’s time to make people care.

Dan Schultz is an agribusiness psychotherapist who works with agricultural companies to think differently about their business and their approach to it. Subscribe to Dan’s weekly newsletter, Ag Done Different, for insights and strategies to stay ahead in the agricultural industry.

Tickets are now on sale for evokeAG. 2025 to be held on 18-19 February 2025 in Brisbane, Queensland. Following a sell-out event in 2024 we are encouraging delegates to secure their tickets, flights and accommodation early.

We look forward to seeing you in Brisbane for evokeAG. 2025. In the meantime, catch up on the other conversations about sustainability, climate resilience and the role of agtech in meeting those challenges from here.