What are the different types of innovation?
November 14, 2014 12:26 PM Subscribe
What are the different types of innovation?
For example, electricity was an innovation. But only because of electricity the invention of the electric light bulb possible.
The wheel was an invention. But only because of the wheel the automobile could have been invented.
The World Wide Web was an invention but it was only due to this innovation that internet telephony services like Skype could have been invented.
So my question is: how does one classify the two types of innovation when one innovation enables another. What are the terms used? I hope I've made myself clear...
For example, electricity was an innovation. But only because of electricity the invention of the electric light bulb possible.
The wheel was an invention. But only because of the wheel the automobile could have been invented.
The World Wide Web was an invention but it was only due to this innovation that internet telephony services like Skype could have been invented.
So my question is: how does one classify the two types of innovation when one innovation enables another. What are the terms used? I hope I've made myself clear...
Everything you mentioned is innovation. Everything that's innovative builds on something that was innovated before. That doesn't make it less or an innovation, or a sub-type of an innovation. It's just an innovation.
There's a great Sloan Management Review article 2006 that identified twelve ways that organizations innovate. It might help you think about innovation as being broader than just creating a new thing:
The offerings they create
The platforms they use
The solutions they provide
The customers they serve
The customer experience they create
The value they capture
The process they employ
The organization they create
The supply chain they use
The presence they use to take things to the market
The networking they provide
The brand they create
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 12:58 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]
There's a great Sloan Management Review article 2006 that identified twelve ways that organizations innovate. It might help you think about innovation as being broader than just creating a new thing:
The offerings they create
The platforms they use
The solutions they provide
The customers they serve
The customer experience they create
The value they capture
The process they employ
The organization they create
The supply chain they use
The presence they use to take things to the market
The networking they provide
The brand they create
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 12:58 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]
The wheel was an invention. But only because of the wheel the automobile could have been invented.
And the wheel required hand tools, and the car enabled drive-thrus.
Every invention is dependent on another and enables still more.
posted by empath at 1:33 PM on November 14, 2014
And the wheel required hand tools, and the car enabled drive-thrus.
Every invention is dependent on another and enables still more.
posted by empath at 1:33 PM on November 14, 2014
It seems to me that you can distinguish between inventions that allow you to do something that was previously impossible such as the telephone, radio, the airplane, and an innovation that is an better way of doing something that was previously possible such as LCD lights, hybrid cars, etc.
Not always easy to tell the difference, though.
posted by SemiSalt at 3:19 PM on November 14, 2014
Not always easy to tell the difference, though.
posted by SemiSalt at 3:19 PM on November 14, 2014
The Russian method of creativity or innovation might be interesting to you. TRIZ
posted by mearls at 7:09 PM on November 14, 2014
posted by mearls at 7:09 PM on November 14, 2014
I've heard it called a breakthrough (the wheel) and kaizen (Japanese term, small and continuous improvements, in this case iterations of the wheel and its adjacent technologies).
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:06 AM on November 15, 2014
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:06 AM on November 15, 2014
jacobean: "So my question is: how does one classify the two types of innovation when one innovation enables another. What are the terms used? I hope I've made myself clear..."
The theory of innovation you've put forth here is that there is no eureka moment, even though you may feel it. Steven Johnson's TED Talk promoting a book of his discusses how Darwin stated he had a Eureka moment while reading Malthus, but someone went through Darwin's notebooks and discovered that Natural Selection's basic concepts were all recorded months prior to the moment Darwin cites. His point is that innovation's main job is joining ideas together to form new ones, and until you have the prerequisites, you are unlikely to come up with lasting innovations. So dependency or prerequisite are the half the equation you're likely looking for, but I don't have the other half.
Another way to classify innovation is sustaining vs disruptive. Clayton Christianson's book follows this model. Sustaining innovations help you serve existing clients better; disruptive innovations better serve customers you don't know exist. Imagine a hard drive manufacturer in 1990; most drives made are going into mainframes and servers. A sustaining technology helps you better serve those people; higher drive density, for example, is appreciated by datacenter operators. A disruptive technology helps a class of buyer you don't care as much about; smaller form factor drives, were initially driven by laptop sales. The reason Christianson calls these technologies "disruptive" is that eventually the inferior technology gains its own set of sustaining innovations, and becomes competitive to yours. Only developing technologies to sustain your existing customers dooms firms to failure.
Most servers I run right now use 2.5" drives, which keep the footprint low, and fits more iops into a smaller space. Dell's newest servers run 1.8" drives into a single 1U server. This is intended for SSDs I gather, which is itself a disruptive technology -- no amount of getting perpendicular will help improve solid state drives.
posted by pwnguin at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2014
The theory of innovation you've put forth here is that there is no eureka moment, even though you may feel it. Steven Johnson's TED Talk promoting a book of his discusses how Darwin stated he had a Eureka moment while reading Malthus, but someone went through Darwin's notebooks and discovered that Natural Selection's basic concepts were all recorded months prior to the moment Darwin cites. His point is that innovation's main job is joining ideas together to form new ones, and until you have the prerequisites, you are unlikely to come up with lasting innovations. So dependency or prerequisite are the half the equation you're likely looking for, but I don't have the other half.
Another way to classify innovation is sustaining vs disruptive. Clayton Christianson's book follows this model. Sustaining innovations help you serve existing clients better; disruptive innovations better serve customers you don't know exist. Imagine a hard drive manufacturer in 1990; most drives made are going into mainframes and servers. A sustaining technology helps you better serve those people; higher drive density, for example, is appreciated by datacenter operators. A disruptive technology helps a class of buyer you don't care as much about; smaller form factor drives, were initially driven by laptop sales. The reason Christianson calls these technologies "disruptive" is that eventually the inferior technology gains its own set of sustaining innovations, and becomes competitive to yours. Only developing technologies to sustain your existing customers dooms firms to failure.
Most servers I run right now use 2.5" drives, which keep the footprint low, and fits more iops into a smaller space. Dell's newest servers run 1.8" drives into a single 1U server. This is intended for SSDs I gather, which is itself a disruptive technology -- no amount of getting perpendicular will help improve solid state drives.
posted by pwnguin at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2014
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Ten Types of Innovation (as a spectrum)
Four Types of Innovation (as a 2x2 matrix)
There's another breakdown that I can't find a reference for that has different breakdown that contrasts product, business model, process and regulatory innovation, where regulatory issues are absent from that first list of 10 types.
All inventions are built on top of things that came before, so I don't think there's really ever a separate category for when one thing enables another. There's a distinction between disruptive innovation (a la Christensen) where a product that's "bad" displaces a product that's "good" (desktop PCs displacing mainframes/minicomputers) versus sustaining innovation where a product gets better over time (hard drives getting bigger over time while remaining generally the same product).
"Electricity" wasn't what most people would consider an invention because it's not a discrete thing that you can put in your hands. There were batteries, there were generators, there was study of static electricity as far back as the 1600's. So that isn't the kind of thing most people mean when they say "invention" or "innovation". Motors were built based on the studies of electromagnetism which were driven by the invention of batteries, driven by general study of chemistry, etc, etc.
The Web was built on a bajillion other things in computer science like networking, hypertext representation via in-line document metadata, etc, etc.
The wheel was preceded by dragging stuff and rolling things over logs. Dragging stuff was probably the first invention that doesn't have a precedent that I can think of. And I don't know of a specific label for it.
posted by GuyZero at 12:40 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]