Latin America does not have a good record when it comes to producing innovations that foster diversification and growth. Because this failing negatively affects the growth of companies in comparison to their competitors, the WofA Innovates Challenge has been launched, the goal being to partner with wineries to make the wine industry more dynamic. Sign up now!
At the end of 2020, Transforme Consultores carried out an assessment of the level of innovation in the Argentine wine industry that coevered several different companies. The survey came up with an average Innovation Coefficient of 7.6, much lower than the average of 12.9 (*).
Why is that? Many companies and organizations still see innovation as something you do when ‘things are going well’, something to be postponed until you have more time, critical problems have been resolved or when a specific stage has been reached.
But the right time and place to innovate isn’t tomorrow. Innovation takes time and organization. It’s a process that can be learned and applied to every different facet of a company or industry and help to deliver solutions to a host of problems, big and small. Innovation is thus a constant source of value that can be added to processes, partners, users, stakeholders and the ecosystem in which they co-exist.
It’s time to discard the outdated assumption that innovation requires complex development and major investment. We need to accept that one can’t wait for the perfect moment in which to say ‘now we’re ready to innovate’. Every crisis is an opportunity, as the saying goes, but that’s only true when one has a vision and understanding of the value that innovation brings. When we’ve learned that that innovation needs to be made part of our every day life, we will learn that vision and see problems and crises as the beginning of something that might well become a major disruptive innovation or an innovation whose very simplicity might be the reason it’s so effective.
WofA Innova
With its Open Innovation Challenge, Wines of Argentina is offering an example of how to convert crises into opportunities. The platform is looking to convert the increased digitization forced upon us by the pandemic into an opportunity to come up with an innovation that will help to raise the profile of the Argentine wine brand among more countries and users across the planet. Using digitization as a means of reaching out to global wine consumers is an enormous challenge that will require creativity and dedication from wineries. It is a challenge to which everyone can contribute in the knowledge that disruptive ideas are available to anyone with the ability to look around and offer a new view of the world.
For these reasons, WofA is launching the WofA Innovates Challenge from its dedicated website http://www.wofainnova.com.ar. There, wineries can get more information and share their innovative ideas as well as signing up to Innovation Workshops through the following form: https://forms.gle/jThbX2hH5SWpGutK8
This challenge is proof that the perfect moment to innovate is now. Now is the time to convert difficulties into opportunities. Now is the time to develop paradigm-changing projects. Now is the time for innovation to begin.
Innovation isn’t conformity, it’s looking to the future; not to keep up, but to lead.
(*) Assessment carried out according to the Innovation Score Card. The Argentine sample included 11 companies in the sector. The average was taken from different countries in Latin America across multiple industries.
