TOTAL LICENSING
Innovation is Hard. In the latest of his regular columns for Total Licensing, Gary Pope, CEO and Co-Founder of Kids Industries and Children’s Commissioner for Products of Change focuses on the benefits of innovation in the children’s entertainment business.
It wouldn’t be called innovation if it was easy. Our industry projects a wonderful innovation game. Well-meaning always, but not actually, truly innovative. Real innovation in the world of licensing is rare. And yes, there are some very notable exceptions - and you know who you are - but groundbreaking, market-defying, consumer-delighting innovation doesn’t happen very much. Innovation is mainly misinterpreted as novelty. Slapping on a new label, launching another iteration of a popular character, or integrating a surfacelevel digital feature are all labelled as “innovative.” They are not! Products tend to remain (more or less) static, and the audience, particularly children, move quickly on to the next thing. Perpetuating a cycle that just keeps rolling out the same product experience but with just enough nip and tuck to convince the retailer that they’ve got an exclusive that would be daft not to list. Why should we change if the model works - why fix what‘s not broken? Only it is broken. Something is at least and 2024 seems to be a temporal testament to that. 2024 wasn’t very kind, and if you’ve survived to ‘25 you’ll al-
“If you only do what you can do, you can never be more than what you are now.” Albert Einstein ready know that the mere passage of the earth around the sun will not shift the melange of macroeconomics that are playing merry havoc with, well, everything. This is very toy-specific and may not
100