Types of Innovation
A lot of people have been quizzing me about the relationship between collaboration and innovation. This got me to thinking about types of innovation over the weekend.
In my experience I’ve come across the following:
Process innovation - deliver a product faster or cheaper; Dell was a process innovator through it’s mastery of supply chain management.
Shop front innovation - sell a given product differently. Amazon is a great example, selling an old fashioned commodity (books) through a web browser.
Product innovation - Improve an existing product.
I did a search on Google and - as you might expect - there has been a lot of study in this area. Although there are several different characterizations, to my mind, two other significant sorts were thrown up by my search:
Business Model innovation - For me an example is Skype, who employs their customers computers as parts of their infrastructure for routing calls. This does not improve the product! This allows them to scale users for free.
Marketing innovation - Discovery of new markets (who knew teenagers would buy stuff!?) and ways of reaching those markets. I’m tempted to roll this into the shop front innovation but one could still market to the same people, the same way but through a different shop front.
