| |October 20189CIOReviewAs a startup, working out innovation strategy is also a function of overall risk-return orientation or appetite of the firm and founderscompany should be ready for that. If a company wants to pursue this strategy, another approach may be to have a portfolio of products or solutions to average out failures. Putting all eggs in one basket may not be a good idea but for a resource-constrained startup, this may be difficult to achieve.Innovation strategy will also depend on what is hap-pening on the customer side. If the customer is not able to adapt to new product or solution which is already there in market and startup does not want to take too much risk, only coming out with new product or solution may not help in winning in the market. Thinking of making the customer experience better or reaching to customers easily may help. Some of the cloud companies are doing that. They are developing tools, which can help customers to use cloud infrastructure or service easily. This includes companies that are doing tooling for easy migration of data and applications to the cloud. To do further innova-tion here based on improving customer experience, firms may look at current problems or difficulties being faced by firms in using cloud-based infrastructure and services. Innovation strategy can be applied in a recursive man-ner. Once an innovation has been identified such as new offering to help in data and application migration over the cloud, the firm can see existing player now in this market scope. A question here will be that in this mar-ket where there are many players offering tools, solu-tions, and services for cloud data and application migra-tion, what innovation strategy or innovation choice will make sense?Though the origin of this market has been based on improving customer experience with cloud services, fur-ther innovation is possible here on elements such as cost and process. If offering or solution from startup can re-duce the overall cost of doing data or application migra-tion, it can help to win in the market. A startup can take innovation initiative in this direction. Similarly, process innovation can be carried out where many elements can be explored for innovation such as combining multiple steps, defining a concurrent process to reduce overall time or errors in doing migration etc. There are some firms, which are doing innovations in reaching out to the customer. Some of the current of-ferings are expensive for customers or customers do not want to use those offerings because of data privacy con-cerns. In that case, hosting a data center and cloud in the local market can be a good solution. How do startups capture the value of cloud from cus-tomers is another area of possibility. Cloud infrastructure offers its own unique advantage. Exotel here is a good example. They are providing cloud telephony services on top of a cloud platform. Providing cloud-based IoT services or infrastructure is another way some companies have found to capture the value of cloud infrastructure and cloud business model. Innovation strategy can be a deliberate choice of Start-up firm and if carefully done, can lead to a higher rate of success in the market. Virendra Gupta
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