{"id":11219,"date":"2015-02-09T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.wework.com\/?p=11219"},"modified":"2020-03-30T23:20:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T03:20:35","slug":"one-thing-innovative-companies-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/professional-development\/one-thing-innovative-companies-common","title":{"rendered":"The one thing all innovative companies have in common"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">The rants against the latest technologies and companies are old-hat at this point: that they isolate, they separate neighbor from neighbor, that they\u2019ll all leave us all in <em>Black Mirror<\/em>\u2013like stupors while taking profits off ads. And for some Silicon Valley companies, this doesn\u2019t actually seem like such a bad end result. Better living through algorithms, higher profits through responsive web design. Now, are algorithms and good mobile experiences crucial to just about any company these days? Sure. But those things aren\u2019t the reason why we get excited about the companies we love. What\u2019s truly exciting, what\u2019s truly new these days, is the unparalleled human experiences companies are starting offer. Fifty companies trying to push direct connection above all else can be seen on <em>Fast Company<\/em>\u2019s list of the Most Innovative Companies of 2015.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ww2.wework.com\/what-innovation-means-to-us\/\">We\u2019re proud to be named on this venerable list<\/a>. But looking at the top and the bottom of the list is remarkably instructive on its own. At Number One there\u2019s glasses company Warby Parker, and rounding out the list is cosmetics giant L\u2019Oreal. At first glance the two companies couldn\u2019t be more different. L\u2019Oreal, founded in Paris 1909, was celebrating its 101st birthday when Warby Parker was founded in 2010 in New York City. L\u2019Oreal has a world-stomping brand: as the leading seller of cosmetics products worldwide, it enjoys the freedom to experiment in the new Connected Beauty Incubator. And Warby Parker, for all of its hype, is still a competitor in the cutthroat world of eyeglasses sales, competing with price-slashing, poorly designed warehouse websites.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">What\u2019s the connection between these two companies? It\u2019s the same link that ties them to WeWork and other list-makers like Mark43 and General Assembly: these are companies powered by people. It may sound cheesy, but it\u2019s true: L\u2019Oreal, for example, behaved much less like a huge international corporation and much more like a start-up when it reached out to YouTube star Michelle Phan and gave her her own makeup line. Would Phan appeal to literally every L\u2019Oreal user? Of course not. But L\u2019Oreal realized that its customers were interested not in buying goods but in plugging in to a sensibility and a way of life. Phan represented this aesthetic, and L\u2019Oreal was innovative for having tapped her.<\/p>\n<p>The same attitude is on display at Warby Parker. As Co-CEO Dave Gilboa told <em>Fast Company<\/em>, \u201cWhen we launched, a lot of people bucketed us as an e-commerce company, but we never thought of ourselves as an e-commerce company&#8230;The only products we sell now are glasses, but we think our brand can stand for much more than that over a long time period.&#8221; Gilboa probably isn\u2019t talking about expanding into watches, phones, or publishing. He\u2019s talking about standing for a direct connection between company and customer, and understanding that people love and trust companies that enable them to live a richer, more passionate, more fulfilled life. And he\u2019s not only talking the talk: when a customer named Kevin tweeted that after calling the company of the phone, he &#8220;has a crush on the girl from Warby Parker,\u201d the company soon released a video of the employee saying hi to him. It was a quick burst of light in not only Kevin\u2019s day, surely, but also in an Internet that loves seeing the connection between two people. What today\u2019s most innovative companies understand is that there\u2019s nothing stronger in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The rants against the latest technologies and companies are old-hat at this point: that they isolate, they separate neighbor from neighbor, that they\u2019ll all leave us all in Black Mirror\u2013like stupors while taking profits off ads. And for some Silicon Valley companies, this doesn\u2019t actually seem like such a bad end result. Better living through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":910,"featured_media":11221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43902],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-professional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.4 (Yoast SEO v25.3.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The one thing all innovative companies have in common<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The rants against the latest technologies and companies are old-hat at this point: that they isolate, they separate neighbor from neighbor, t\u2026\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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