What is innovation?

Posted at March 15, 2010 // Strategy / Tactics

This has been a crazy week for me at work, leading a few campaigns with new products. This got me thinking about innovation. What is innovation? We all know that there are different levels of innovations, but I’ve never really come across a framework till this week.

There are three types of innovation.

Breakthrough
Expansionary
Incremental

Breakthrough is something that’s truly blazing new territories. To be honest, most of these brazen innovators remain unknown to the world. Most new companies / new products die in fairly early states without adequate support. Countless nameless mp3 players fit into this category for being breakthrough innovations in the portable music category.

Expansionary continues to expand the category. iPod. A few versions of iPod fit into this category as well… the video iPod expanded the portable category into different media.

Incremental. Some versions of iPod, such as the shuffle, are purely incremental. This is when companies start to think about how to bring in that extra consumer. This could be giving that extra gig to iPod storage. This could be lowering the price by removing some features.

However, this framework works for innovations outside new products as well. You could innovate the way you go to business. You could innovate what business you’re in. Breakthrough can be simply a breakthrough for your own business. When mass merchandiser started carrying groceries, that was a breakthrough for their businesses. When they started experimenting with various store formats, that was expanding their business in being a grocer. It is incremental when they started optimizing their shelves on how much groceries versus general merchandises they’d carry.

I’m going to take a little detour here. As we’re on the topic of innovation, I’d like to leave you with a cartoon from one of my favorite cartoonist. This is partially why there are so many more incremental innovations than breakthrough innovations. Something to think about