Opportunity waits for no one. In this world of virtualized cloud environments and real-time data, opportunity can come and go very quickly, indeed. Businesses must be able to quickly adapt to changes in the market and in technology or lose out to their competition. This is not an easy thing.

“The fancy word is innovation; in the real world, it’s change,” said Brian Curran (pictured), vice president of CX strategy and design at Oracle Corp.

Curran spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, to talk about innovation and the art of innovating at a company level. (*Disclosure below.)

Trends, changes and expectations

The hard truth is that people are afraid of changes in their organization. That’s not unreasonable. Because of this, rebuilding a company around innovation is something of an art and a science, according to Curran. It starts with getting the right people involved. Everyone must be on board to change the culture of a company, he stated.

Increased customer expectations also drive the need to innovate. Customers deal with Amazon, for example, and then come to another brand asking why they’re not like Amazon. To keep their customers, companies must make changes quickly. “The old days of strategy sessions and waiting six months will put you out of business,” Curran said.

The cloud is a major part of moving quickly. With the cloud, businesses can quickly go from rapid prototyping to putting the product right in front of the customer, he explained. Companies can learn about the customer experience as it happens and then take that understanding into the next version of the product. The cloud allows business to innovate on the fly.

To truly take advantage of this speed and power, a company needs to make a commitment to a process of design, testing and learning, Curran added. Failure, too, is a part of this process, but there are lessons in failure. To quickly innovate, a company must have it in its DNA that moving fast reduces risk, allows them to learn quickly and gives them the ability to catch opportunity by making changes.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE