Innovation — Don’t Cross The Streams!

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https://timoelliott.com/blog/innovation-cartoons
Innovation works — except when it doesn’t. And yes, there are many, many reason why it doesn’t work, with the most obvious being that you can’t innovate on command (“invent a better mousetrap by tomorrow!”).
That said, the most common reason it fails is because innovation actually falls into a couple of different buckets, and innovating your way out of the wrong bucket is a recipe for disaster.
The buckets in this case are
  1. 1. Sustaining Innovation (aka “Getting better at what you already do”): You know the problem space, you know the skills you need to succeed, and you iterate through creative ideas, testing and refining solutions till you hit your goal. Design Thinking is a textbook example here.
  2. 2. Breakthrough Innovation (aka “Thinking out-of-the-box”): You know the problem space, you don’t know what skills you’ll need to solve it, so you focus on unconventional approaches, combining knowledge and approaches across different fields.
  3. 3. Disruptive Innovation (aka: “The One You Are Thinking Of”): You are getting — increasingly! — awesome at things that people want less of. Sustaining and Breakthrough innovations are no longer going to cut it, you need to disrupt your business model itself. This — Clayton Christensen, and The Innovator’s Dilemma — are probably what you instinctively associate with “Innovation”, eh?
  4. 4. Research Driven Innovation (aka: “R&D”): Research in it’s own right, driven by it’s own criteria — an “open checkbook” if you will. You don’t know what you might get out of it, it might be nothing, or world-changing. Also, this is the one that is increasingly being given short-shrift these days .
Each of these is distinct, has it’s own techniques, best-practices, and criteria for success. However, using techniques from, say Disruptive Innovation to Sustain your existing business — well, let’s just say it’s doomed to fail!
The bottom line here is “Don’t cross the streams”. Figure out what type of innovation you actually need — and can afford! — and focus on that!

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