Hitting the Innovation Jackpot

Types of Innovation There are several types of innovation based upon either the activity performed or the domain in which it will be applied. The types of innovation based upon activity starts with what most people think of when they say innovation: creational innovation. Creativity is the source of so many spiritual aspects of innovation. Mark Twain may have said it best (Twain, 1869): “To give birth to an idea – to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make lightning carry your messages. To be first – that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which all other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.” Mark Twain Yet creativity is usually a stringing together of insights through recognition of patterns that did not previously exist. (Sheldrake, 1988) However, I have determined that while creational innovation is all about discovery, there are two ways in which creativity is manifested. The process may flow in either direction of the chain showed below: When the process starts with a need and then moves to the right toward a new approach this ‘need to new’ development is considered ‘innovation to satisfy’. This is usually associated with the process of trying to bring value to a customer. When an engineer is confronted with having too many bird strikes on an airplane canopy the must invent some device to prevent this hazard. Strengthening the cockpit is a brute force approach that would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. Conversely, including an acoustic device onto the fuselage that creates a sound that birds do not like provides a creative, low-cost, and easy to implement solution. The ‘new to need’ sequence is considered an ‘innovation to justify’. “EUREKA!” then what? Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone responding to a telegraph improvement program. He tried many different combinations of devices and triggers to create different phenomenon. It is unclear if he was really that interested in creating the telegraph as he was interested in doing something that permitted information to passed some way other than the physical passing of written material. He was trying to solve a problem that had not yet been identified. Greatest innovators discovered the ‘problem’ that no one else cared about before creating a solution. By the way, many unsuccessful failed inventors have solved problems that have never become important. Just as I often say that “it is fine line between being overworked and unemployed” it is similarly “a fine line between inventive genius and utter personal and professional failure”. It may be said that some of the most important creational innovations have been the result of chance – a dropped beaker in the lab that did not break, a ‘failed’ recipe that a coworker tastes and declares the best yet, and so on. The next type of innovation - integrative innovation – may well be the most prevalent form of innovation. Integrative innovation exploits legacy components of other solutions to create a new, more powerful capability. This recombination may manifest itself in several ways: - Rearrange/reorder: the first shall be last and the last shall be first, - Assemble/aggregate: join operationally, - Interface: ease the merging of two objects, - Interoperate: have two devices work together that used to work independently, and - Rediscover: dust off some old solution and apply in a new way. Integrative innovation will become more and more important as customers want revolutionary value propositions at low risk. Integrative innovation provides the proven performance of component solutions with only the interoperability being at issue. In this way, innovation will start to become more of an engineering task, creating easy interfaces that empower multiple capabilities in an orchestra of value. Creational and integrative innovation are often discussed in terms of technological or product innovations. However, this need not be the case. Two other dimensions of innovation are that of process and business model innovations. Product (or technological) innovation while more prevalent, is also potentially high risk, and has a fairly low impact relative to process or business model innovations. Process innovation has medium risk and medium impact so is actually the sweet spot for innovation: highest expected value. Process model has lower risk and higher potential impact than product/technological innovation because it is easier to implement and generally has a wider scope of application within an enterprise. While a single technological innovation may influence those employees or customers who deal with that product, a process innovation may be applied across multiple product lines.