About Innovation

Innovation can be define as the result of making changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, products, or by bringing new value. From this definition transpire 2 aspects of Innovation : Novelty and Value creation. Those 2 aspects are the reason why Innovating is not Copying.

Although many frameworks exist to classify Innovation, I will illustrate the Henderson-Clark model were they divide innovation into four types :

For the types I use an extract from Wikipedia's article on Innovation

• Incremental innovation: "refines and extends an established design. Improvement occurs in individual components, but the underlying core design concepts, and the links between them, remain the same."?
• Architectural innovation: "innovation that changes only the relationships between the core design concepts".
• Modular Innovation: "innovation that changes only the core design concepts of a technology"
• Radical innovation : "Establishes a new dominant design and, hence, a new set of core design concepts embodied in components that are linked together in a new architecture."?This is also called disruptive Innovation, and is the most wanted or dreaded, depending on which side of the disruption you are.

But, how do we apply this in practice ? How do we know or measure the Innovation that we can produce ? The answer lies in the Novelty of the Innovation and the Value created (or outcome). And using these 2 here are some ways to innovate:

• Improve the existing : For example have a greater user experience, or do the same quality for less.
• Use the existing to solve a different problem : take the product and concept and apply it to solve and entire different problem. Example NFC was not originally designed for wireless changing.
• Experiment with the parameters of a successful formula : How Champagne was invented.
• Change the game and create a new paradigm from the existing product: Some examples : Google's search algorithm, Apple's IPod and IPhone, Reusable rockets SpaceX.

No matter how you take it Innovation will bring challenges and will require courage, perseverance, humility, curiosity, ambition and vision. That is for the Novelty part. For the Value Creation part it will require that you have skilled Market, Marketing, Sales and Product specialists.

Finally, nowadays you also need someone from legal with skills in Intellectual Property to protect you or your innovation when it applies, but also to advise so you may not break the law.