According to Wikipedia, “innovation” may refer to both radical and incremental changes in thinking, in processes or in services.  Too often nowadays the term is thrown around without much thought to the real meaning.  Radical and incremental changes are paramount to innovation, but which companies are forcing them?  Innovation in manufacturing processes is something companies have been improving for hundreds of years.  From Ford with the first assembly line, to Dell with the construction and availability of the laptop computer, and recently Netflix with the way DVD’s are automatically processed and shipped directly to your home via your online list.    

But how would you define modern day innovation in the typically boring industry of printing?  Would a company that seamlessly produced more than 8,000,000,000 business cards worldwide in just eight years be considered innovative?  What if it also produced more than 3,000,000 self-inking stamps or nearly 900,000,000 million postcards over that same time span?  If that same company was using these manufacturing processes to literally give products away by the billions and still grow revenue at a nearly 60% rate year over year, would that be considered innovative?

The truth is that VistaPrint has achieved all of these things using a very simple but radical manufacturing concept:  print and manufacture customized products in short runs in mass quantities.  Prior to the company’s inception, this had not been seen in the printing industry.  But while the theory is simple, the patented technology behind it is not.  And the same concepts used to make the printed products mentioned above like business cards and postcards are also being used to manufacture products like pens, T-Shirts, letterhead, sticky notes, car door magnets, and dozens of other products small businesses need to succeed each and every day.  Using the Internet as a vehicle, VistaPrint has automated and personalized a creative industry that was once thought incapable of either. 

Simply put, graphic design used to be difficult.  It meant consulting with someone on colors and schemes, putting in an order (with a typical order in the thousands) and then waiting weeks to receive it.  Now anyone can go online, design a product like a business card, and have as few as 250 shipped to them in three days.   Innovation not only means radically changing a process, it means making things easier for the consumer, just like Ford, Dell, and Netflix.  VistaPrint has also achieved this feat in the printing industry. 

So if you’re looking for innovative processes and companies that have forged them, I thought you might want to take a closer look at VistaPrint.