What is innovation?
Posted on December 31st, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 6 Comments.
It is a loaded term – it means different things to different people (here’s the Wikipedia reference, for instance).
To me, it seems that there are two competing “innovation camps” which I sum up as follows:
1) Disruptive Innovation
This school of thought is all about major step-changes (i.e. creating wholly new market segments with revolutionary technology, or service – such as the personal computer, the PDA, or on-line brokerage).
For this school of thought, “creativity” is the key.
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2) Incremental Innovation
At the other end of the scale, we have the people who see innovation as something that happens more continuously, and incrementally.
In such a paradigm, innovation can occur more scientifically.
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In my view, any organisation will struggle to be good (let alone excellent) at both of these schools of thought.
That’s not to say that they should not try – certainly it is a paradox we will be grappling with in the months and years ahead!
Hope this helps clarify where we are coming from, at least.
[...] The essence of all of these products was conceived in the early years of the company, when we had a different bunch of people on the bus.
[...] us, we need to be focusing on both aspects of idea generation: 1)
[...] In particular, I would like to highlight your need to manage both approaches to Innovation: [...]
[...] type of person (in my view) – for instance: 1)
[...] type of person (in my view) – for instance: 1)
I don’t have time at the moment to post in detail, but wanted to link this article from HBR entitled “What’s Stopping Innovation” as the article - and the comments below - provide some useful food for thought.