Question

Inventions become innovations when they are refined to such an extent that they continue to
be successful in the market long after they were first invented. This is directly adding
significant value to consumers such as adding new personalities and characteristics to
products to suit and adapt to consumers’ ever-changing needs. The ultimate objective of
innovation is to create sustainable growth that leads to a competitive advantage. To bring
innovation into the market, companies need to conceive an invention and create a value chain
around it.
Innovation is not only about being creative or inventing something new. It is also about using
knowledge to solve problems. It is about adding value to our work and this can result in a
better product or service. There are four basic types of innovation which are basic, sustaining,
disruptive and breakthrough innovation.

Write an article to depict the four basic types of innovations using ONE example for each
type of innovation. The article must consist of:
i. An introduction section to explain innovation and the basic types of innovation.

Answer 1

There are a lot of definitions of innovations, so many that it’s been difficult to have a meaningful conversation around the word itself. One of the definition is that Innovation is invention plus commercialization.

This means that for innovation to happen you need three things:

1. A market with a need for a solution
2. A technology that could enable the solution to be made
3. A business model that can create, support, deliver and sustain delivery of the solution to the market

In other words…Invention + Commercialization.

Innovation is not only about being creative or inventing something new. It is also about using
knowledge to solve problems. It is about adding value to our work and this can result in a
better product or service. There are four basic types of innovation, which are

1. Basic

2. Sustaining

3. Disruptive

4. Breakthrough

Explaining them on,

1. Basic Innovation -

Pathbreaking innovations never arrive fully formed. They always begin with the discovery of some new phenomenon. No one could guess how Einstein’s discoveries would shape the world, or that Alan Turing’s universal computer would someday become a real thing. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said when asked about the impact of a major discovery, “I don’t know, but we’ll probably tax it.” To his point, Einstein’s discoveries now play essential roles in technologies ranging from nuclear energy to computer technologies and GPS satellites.

Some large enterprises, like IBM and Procter & Gamble, have the resources to invest in labs to pursue basic research. Others, like Experian’s DataLabs, encourage researchers and engineers to go to conferences and hold internal seminars on what they learn. Google invites about 30 top researchers to spend a sabbatical year at the company and funds 250 academic projects annually.

2. Sustaining Innovations -

Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we are seeking to get better at what we’re already doing. We want to improve existing capabilities in existing markets, and we have a pretty clear idea of what problems need to be solved and what skill domains are required to solve them.

For these types of problems, conventional strategies like strategic roadmapping, traditional R&D labs, and using acquisitions to bring new resources and skill sets into the organization are usually effective. Design thinking methods, such as those championed by David Kelley, founder of the design firm IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, can also be enormously helpful if both the problem and the skills needed to solve it are well understood.

3. Disruptive Innovations -

When HBS professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, it was a revelation. In his study of why good firms fail, he found that what is normally considered best practice — listening to customers, investing in continuous improvement, and focusing on the bottom line — can be lethal in some situations.

In a nutshell, what he discovered is that when the basis of competition changes, because of technological shifts or other changes in the marketplace, companies can find themselves getting better and better at things people want less and less. When that happens, innovating your products won’t help — you have to innovate your business model.

More recently, Steve Blank has developed lean startup methods and Alex Osterwalder has created tools like the business model canvas and value proposition canvas. These are all essential assets for anyone who finds themselves in the situation Christensen described, and they are proving to be effective in a wide variety of contexts.

4. Breakthrough Innovations -

Sometimes, as was the case with the example of detecting pollutants underwater, we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains, such as adding a marine biologist to a team of chip designers. Open innovation strategies can be highly effective in this regard, because they help to expose the problem to diverse skill domains.

As Thomas Kuhn explained in the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we advance in specific fields by creating paradigms, which sometimes can make it very difficult to solve a problem within the domain in which it arose — but the problem may be resolved fairly easily within the paradigm of an adjacent domain.