Mapping Innovation

Innovation is an uncertain journey— you never really know where you’ll end up or even if you’ll be successful at all.

What we do know though, is just turning your idea into a reality isn’t enough; you have to generate some kind of value from it — both for your customers and for your for your business.

Innovation is the messy process of turning an idea into reality and capturing value from it.

But with so many new opportunities to create value, the question is, where do you start? And how do you avoid looking in the same old places, again and again?

The power of maps

I can’t imagine trying to get somewhere new anymore without using my phone. I just open Google Maps and the GPS tells me where I am and I can easily see what direction I need to go in. Zero time is spent getting lost and I can enjoy the journey.

“Maps encourage boldness. They make anything seem possible.” — Mark Jenkins

Boldness is exactly what we need if we want to succeed in innovation.

The innovation space

‘The Innovation Space’ is a bit like a compass for your business. It helps you navigate the improvements you need to make to your business so you feel confident that what you are focussing on is going to get you where you want to be.

The way I think about it is, on a map, you have four main directions — north, south, east and west.

Across your business, you have four main places you can start making change happen:

1. ?? New product or service— what you offer the world
2. ? New process— how you create and deliver that offering
3. ???? New target market — who you offer it to and the story you tell about it
4. ?? New business model — the way you think about what your organisation does and who you do it for

The Innovation Space helps us get clear about where to innovate, what to prioritise and why it’s worth doing.

Out of all of the things you could do, what are you going to choose to do, and why?

There’s plenty of innovation space across every organisation and countless journeys you could go on, not just along the four main directions but also in combinations.

How far are you going?

As with any journey, once you decide which direction you want to go in, you can either take small steps forward (doing what you already do a little better) or giant leaps forward (doing something radically different).

When some people think about innovation, they very often get excited about the headline grabbing stuff, the radical change, that makes for good clickbait articles, but innovation isn’t always like that.

Most innovation is rather boring; most innovation, most of the time is doing what we already do, just a little bit better, but it’s worth doing. – John Bessant

The truth is neither one is better than the other. The most successful organisations know how to do both.

Let’s look at some examples and then reflect on what this means for you and your business.

1. New product or service

Product or service innovation is about making changes to the things your business offers the world.

Apple

The launch of their first iPhone was a radical product change, nothing like it had ever been seen before. Since then, Apple has focussed on making smaller incremental changes by releasing updated models of the iPhone each year. The initial iPhone opened up a whole new market for Apple, while releasing updates each year has enabled them to successfully and sustainably commercialise it.

Spotify

The music industry has seen a lot of product innovation in terms of improving the way we store and play our music. The CD replaced, the cassette and the the cassette replaced vinyl. More recently, Spotify, and other music streaming services, have radically changed the model from physical product ownership to digital subscription services.

2. New process

Process innovation is another direction you can go in and that’s about changing the way you create and deliver whatever it is your business offers. You can make changes to processes across any part of your organisation such as delivery, sales, customer service and manufacturing. The same rules apply here — you can make both radical and incremental changes.

Toyota

Toyota are famous for how they manufacture their cars. It’s called the Toyota Production System. It’s all about continuous improvement, making lots of small, 1% changes and removing waste. For a long time, this advantage meant they were able to produce their cars at a lower cost than their competitors and therefore sell them at a lower price.

Amazon Go

Amazon has radically transformed the way customers pay for items in their stores. Instead of a manual process, it’s done automatically via cameras and the app. You can walk into the store, put whatever you want in your basket and walk straight out because you get charged via the app.

3. New target market

You can change the way you position your product in the eyes of your customers or even target a completely new set of customers all together without having necessarily to make changes to your product, processes or business model.

Lucozade

Lucozade was originally developed in 1927 as a glucose-based drink to help children and adults recover from illness. Later on, they re-launched the product as a health drink aimed at the fitness market. The product stayed the same, the only thing that really changed was the target market.

Monzo

One of my favourite examples is Monzo which is a bit of a product and positioning innovation combo. They successfully positioned themself as the first UK mobile only bank and targeted an existing underserved market — millenials living in cities.

They did this by creating a remarkable user experience that really got their customers talking about (and sharing) the app with their friends. Monzo has super loyal fans of the brand which is something that is very unusual for a financial services product especially for this target market.

4. New business model

Sometimes, opportunities for innovation emerge when you change the way you look at your business and one of the best tools for doing this is the Business Model Canvas by Strategyzer.

Amazon

Amazon are one of the few major companies to be repeatedly successful at business model innovation. Amazon was originally an online retailer of books. But they created a whole new business model on top of this, when they realised they had excess server capacity and so saw an opportunity to offer cloud computing services to other companies — Amazon Web Services was born and now represents about 10% of overall revenue.

Makers Apprenticeships

Makers was one of the first coding bootcamps. But, when the Apprenticeship Levy came in they saw an opportunity to tap into a new revenue stream. Instead of charging students to learn as they were before, they charged large companies instead. These companies were happy to pay because they needed more developers and the students were happy because they actually got paid a salary rather than being charged student fees.

Applying it to your own business

Here are three questions to get you thinking about how you can explore the innovation space in your own business.

1. What changes have you made in the past to your business? Have they been to your product, processes, target market or business model?
2. Where does it make sense for you to start looking for new opportunities to innovate in your business?
3. Out of all of the things you could do, what are you going to choose to do, and why?

Follow me on my journey across the innovation space via Instagram where I share posts on innovation, business, design and learning.

Also, check out Riding the Innovation Wave by John Bessant as well as his YouTube channel for some golden nuggets on innovation.