In marketing, its all about the market share. What percentage of customers are buying your product rather than a competitors.
When you are not the market leader, you have two choices. Make incremental improvements to try to catch the leader, or boldly re-imagine your offering to leapfrog the market leader.
Five years ago, in 2012, Oregon was 45th in the country in terms of graduation rates. We would joke that Oregon was called the "Mississippi of the West", except that Mississippi's graduation rates were higher than Oregon.
There has been great deal of effort in Oregon over the last five years to improve the performance of education system in Oregon. And graduation rates have improved.
But, in 2017, Oregon is now ranked 47th in terms of graduation rates, two steps closer to the cellar.
The reason for this relative decline is that Oregon is not alone in its effort to improve its educational system. Every state is. And most are improving faster than Oregon, meaning that, despite all of the efforts by Oregon Department of Education and the Chief Education Officer, we are falling further and further behind.
Innovation-base companies know one thing. If you are in a dynamic, hyper-competitive market, a catch-up strategy will almost always fail. The reason is that market leaders are also innovating, and if their rate of innovation is faster than yours, you will simply fall further and further behind.
Sometime, then, you a faced with only one option - one that caries significant risk. And that is to Leapfrog. To create a bold new model that changes the rules of the game. That is what we are doing with our Audacious Aspiration.