Naomi Kelman, CEO, Willow. “Creating a safe environment for innovation is really what you need to do to get the greatness out of the people who work with you, which is ultimately what drives growth.”

Apply constraints: Rather than searching for blue-sky ideas, tighten the constraints on an idea’s business or operating model and explore potential new solutions. What if you served only one type of customer? What if the only channel you could access was online? Modular Innovation: "innovation that changes only the core design concepts of a technology" (p.12) [22] Innovation in American Government: Challenges, Opportunities, and Dilemmas. Brookings Inst Pr. 1 June 1997. ISBN 978-0-8157-0358-7. Baregheh, Anahita; Rowley, Jennifer; Sambrook, Sally (4 September 2009). "Towards a multidisciplinary definition of innovation". Management Decision. 47 (8): 1323–1339. doi: 10.1108/00251740910984578. ISSN 0025-1747.Such performance parameters can seem painful to managers more accustomed to the traditional approach. In our experience, though, CEOs are likely just going through the motions if they don’t use evaluations and remuneration to assess and recognize the contribution that all top managers make to innovation. Choose Core innovation requires minimal or no change to the current business model (customers, offerings, revenue model, resources and processes). Also known as continuous or incremental innovation, this is the unglamorous but deeply important work of constantly improving what you do and how you do it. The information services organization RELX Group brought discipline to choosing its innovation portfolio by running ten to 15 experiments in each customer segment in its pipeline every year. It selects one or two of the most successful ideas from the portfolio to continue. There’s no universally accepted set of innovation types, which is why I recommend that companies consider defining at least three types that reflect their business and forward-looking strategies.

Learn more about our Strategy & Corporate Finance practice. What are examples of successful innovators? Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist—we’ve looked hard for them and don’t think they do—but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success. need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings. Two main dimensions of innovation are degree of novelty (i.e. whether an innovation is new to the firm, new to the market, new to the industry, or new to the world) and kind of innovation (i.e. whether it is process or product-service system innovation). [7] Organizational researchers have also distinguished innovation separately from creativity, by providing an updated definition of these two related constructs: Several frameworks have been proposed for defining types of innovation. [15] [16] Sustaining vs disruptive innovation [ edit ] An 1880 penny-farthing (left), and a 1886 Rover safety bicycle with gearingWe are excited to help the community tell their story," says Anitra Belle Henderson, the executive director of communications and external affairs for the City of Mobile and the lead on all the Africatown projects. "Our goal is for visitors to understand more about those who were enslaved. They have a name and a story." An unmet customer need (the ‘who’): Who is the customer and what problem do they need to solve? Are macrotrends such as automation driving changes in customer needs?