Clay Olivier, CEO, Volusion, Inc.
It all started on a pleasant September day, where, at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo, I was impressed by the potential that a killer API could present. Back at Volusion, Inc. headquarters, my business partner and I had often talked about the idea of building a new platform to disrupt the market. But to that point, it was nothing but an idea — and why wouldn’t it be? Here we were, reaching new heights as an organization: gaining and retaining new customers more efficiently than ever, looking to expand office space, and executing on plans to dominate the SMB e-Commerce space.
After attending this conference, however, I knew we had to look past our current success and turn this idea into reality — we just had to figure out how to do it. And now, five years later, we’re rapidly approaching the release of our new enterprise commerce platform, Mozu, to the world. Looking back on what we’ve accomplished since that day in 2008, I realized that it all stemmed from an ability to innovate from within, despite our existing success and continued plans for growth on that path.
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We, along with other successful companies, found the power to innovate from within by following these principles:
- Innovating from within requires having a pulse on what’s happening on the outside: Our research showed that existing platforms in the enterprise space were built before the big shift to mobile that began in 2008. Because of this, we had a chance to build new API-first technology to meet these new demands. Similarly, Apple saw a big consumer opportunity due to passionate, rapid adoption of the BlackBerry — from that outside observation, the iPhone was born.
- Innovating from within demands facing ambiguity head-on: For an organization to be truly innovative, the team must be willing to face some setbacks and failures. Why? Because there’s no defined process when creating something that doesn’t exist. In fact, we had two big false starts and even went through two changes in our Development leadership to build out the right team for success.
- Innovating from within stems from fostering a culture of innovation: Emphasizing the importance of innovation throughout all areas of an organization empowers its members to bring ideas to the table. This couldn’t happen without encouraging an open exchange of ideas at all levels of the company. One of the highest valued skills of leaders is their creativity and drive to innovate. As a technology business, we’re in a constant state of flux, so the ability to adapt is critical to our success.
- Innovating from within comes from being inherently competitive: It’s easy to become complacent when riding a wave of success, which can be a big obstacle for internal innovation. For example, Amazon is a powerful force in the e-Commerce space, but they’ve continued to invest in finding ways to achieve faster delivery times, all in an effort to become more competitive with big box retailers. They even just announced Sunday deliveries since immediacy can impact consumers buying decisions.
- Innovating from within requires cross-applying otherwise unrelated learnings: One of the most inspiring lessons from creating this platform was taking our discoveries from the new product to find ways to improve our existing one — without challenging the comfort of our success, we could’ve easily missed out on an opportunity to grow even further.
Innovating from within can be challenging, especially when the future of your current path looks so promising. The trick, however, is to remain open-minded to new ideas and disrupt others before they disrupt you. The road to pure innovation can be bumpy, but the ride and ultimate destination is well worth the effort.
Clay Olivier is the CEO at Volusion, Inc., where he guides and oversees the direction of the organization with a strategic vision and motivation for helping business owners succeed online. Before entering the e-Commerce industry, Clay helped lead the Large Opportunity group in the Small Business Division at Dell, and previously worked as a stockbroker with Charles Schwab.
