As we approach the new millennium, the businesses that succeed are the ones using innovative ways to create value for their customers. To beat their competition and again an edge, see what's driving the innovative ways businesses operate:

Driving Force: Real Time Responsiveness: Winning businesses will eliminate customer waiting, whether in line, on hold, or over time, For instance, financial institutions will be forced to give instant mortgage loan approvals, and because of increased competition from electronic commerce, retailers will need to find ways to eliminate waiting in line. Millennium Challenge: Ask yourself: How can we reduce the amount of time spent at every step of our customer's transaction with us? What changes do we make to facilitate speed satisfaction?

Driving Force: User-Friendliness: The trading stamp industry disappeared because it was too inconvenient. In the next five years, the cents off coupon will also disappear. Consider reexamining your "convenience quotient" in light of changing, more harried lifestyles. Examples include the trend toward 24-hour stock trading, real estate firms previewing homes on the Internet, home delivery of groceries for busy consumers. Millennium Challenge: Rethink your entire operation to make what you offer more accessible, user-friendly, portable. Think "one-stop shopping" and reduce the hassle. Make doing business with you easy.

Driving Force: Aging Boomers/Generation X: Generation X and the turning 50 Boomers present countless opportunities for creative responses. On the horizon: a growing Generation X labor shortage. Imagine a motel designed so that the night clerk, instead of snoozing, launders sheets and towels in a high-tech washer/dryer installed behind the desk. Rooms are designed t take less time to clean. Guests can use their own credit cards to access their rooms. Sound far-fetched? It's the way Sleep Inns are built today to counter the growing Baby Bust labor shortage. Millennium Challenge: Brainstorm ways to reduce and make better use of labor so you can provide the services your customers demand.

Driving Force: Mass Customization: Increasingly sophisticated consumers demand more options and "have it your way" solutions in both products and services. Levi Strauss stores measure hard-to-fit women and use the computer to send the specs to their plant in Tennessee. The customer receives the jeans days later. Future-focused leaders will anticipate what it is about their services or products that could benefit from mass customization and respond accordingly. Millennium Challenge: Innovations come from nonstop listening to customers.

Driving Force: Lifestyle: Changing lifestyles are affecting every business, for example: the health and fitness trends are over, fat is back. Families pulled in all directions by busy schedules fly away on vacations away from phones, distractions. Thirteen million Americans are self-employed and work from home. Millennium Challenge: How are changing lifestyles affecting what your customers want from you? How can you profit by responding to these changes?

Driving Force: Unbundled Service: Look for price cutting to intensify even further, spreading to unlikely arenas such as professional services. For example, by teaching do-it-yourself homeowners how to fix up homes, Home Depot saves them money. Millennium Challenge: Rethink: What services can you eliminate from your lineup in order to give the customer a lower price and still make money?

Driving Force: Value Differentiation: If you're not going to be the low-price leader, you must add value continuously. Four Seasons Hotels have computer banks that store information about each guest. Customer Smith prefers a non-allergenic pillow; customer Jones likes a rare kind of tea. The customer wants to know, "What have you done for me lately?" Millennium Challenge: Make sure the value you add is the value your customer seeks.

Driving Force: High Service: Excellent customer service for beleaguered American consumers is so rare that people pay extra for it. Response: Mobil decides to go "high service" and wash windshield sand provide clean rest rooms for motorists with its "Friendly Serve" campaign. So far, it's working. Millennium Challenge: The real differentiation is assembling a team that really cares. This is the real frontier where smart leaders will devote creative energy.

Driving Force: Techno-edge: Technology is not advancing, it is exploding. The future belongs to executives who embrace its possibilities and become early adopters, rather than techno roadkill. Suggestion: search for new tools and software that increase speed, add convenience, raise productivity, and, most of all, challenge conventional wisdom about what can and cannot be done in your industry. Millennium Challenge: Look for techno-edges that can borrowed from other industries.

Driving Force: Quality Perfection: The "quality revolution" is over, but quality as perceived by the customer is anything but guaranteed. now, the expectation of quality is so high that unless you have an empowered workforce and spirit of partnership with all stake holders, you can't compete. This can quickly build a competitive advantage because there's so little of it. Defects add aggravation to today's harried consumers. Business from Rolex to H&R Block have profited from designing quality into operations and exploiting it in marketing. Millennium Challenge: Where do your customers perceive a lack of quality? Unsure where to start? Ask customers what they think of your quality.

The new millennium promises anything but "business as usual." Company leaders need to proactively change with change, rather than react to change. Innovation-coming up with ideas and bringing them to life-must take place at every level of the organization. Resting on one's laurels is not an option.

Robert B. Tucker is a keynote speaker and author of Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change for the Next Century (Berkley Books). Details: (800) 239-6681 or www.innovationresource.com

Original Article here: http://innovationresource.com/Pages/10drivingforces.html