Hint: There are ten! Which ones are you overlooking?
For many years, executives have equated innovation with the development of new products.
Creating new products is only one way to innovate and on its own, provides the lowest return on investment and the least competitive advantage.
Think about any product or feature war you’ve witnessed—whether torque and toughness in trucks or toothbrushes that are easier to hold and use. Too quickly, it all devolves into an expensive mad dash to parity. Product performance innovations that deliver long-term competitive advantage are the exception rather than the rule.
So how do we identify new opportunities beyond products and develop viable innovations?
The Ten Types of Innovation® framework is a useful diagnostic tool to assess how you're approaching innovation internally. It can help you analyze your competitive environment, and it can reveal gaps and potential opportunities for doing something different and upending the market.
Within the Ten Types there are over 100 innovation tactics— or specific, known ways to use the Ten Types of Innovation. These are like the atoms that bond together to form molecules; you can use them to construct the breakthroughs that will help you make a real impact on your industry.
We’ve used the Ten Types in our Sprints with firms large and small.
The most cursory experience our clients will have with the framework goes something like this: we run a workshop for a development team. They are busy people. Often they resent being pulled out of their regular lives in order to talk to innovation consultants who surely know nothing about their business. Mutters abound; “Where do workshops ever go, anyway?”
Then we get down to it. Sure, some Post-It notes are involved, but we pair these with structured, prescriptive worksheets that help everyone in the room know what to do to produce one great concept, not hundreds of bad ones.
Inevitably, the mood in the room changes. Voices become animated. Questions become more pointed and pertinent to the team’s current challenges. The discussion shifts from product features and functionality to business systems, platforms and experiences.
The framework is used to deconstruct other innovations and inspire new breakthroughs. The sessions end with teams believing - and then proving through implementation— the innovations they have designed will succeed.
The Ten Types isn't a panacea. But it’s a big leap forward toward more rigorous and reliable innovation.
Want to open up new possibilities for innovation in your company? Let's talk to discuss a project.
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