Discovering breakthrough products
As Peter Thiel once put it, "competition is for losers."
Any company will indeed be out there competing for market share. Still, you don't ever want to be in a position where the pressure is so intense that the cycle erodes every possible upside — a scenario known as an ideal economic rivalry.
To escape absolute rivalry, businesses must aim to create an economic moat that offers them a long-term competitive edge. Although these defensive moats may emerge from different causes, the most commonly originate from the influence of creativity in today's knowledge economy. But where does creativity come from, how can a prevailing paradigm be implemented to more regularly bring significant breakthroughs?
The 10 Types of Innovation
In today's infographic, we demonstrate the results of years of in-depth Doblin work, an innovation-focused company now owned by Deloitte.
After reviewing over 2,000 business innovations throughout history, Doblin found that most breakthroughs do not necessarily result from engineering inventions or rare discoveries.
Instead, they found that technologies can be classified across a set of 10 distinct dimensions — and anybody can use the resulting competitive structure to evaluate competitiveness, stress check for product vulnerabilities, or identify potential markets for their goods.
From Theory to Practice
Why does creativity look in practice?
Let's see how well-known companies in the past have leveraged each of these 10 forms of creativity, while digging into the strategies that contemporary firms can use to continually produce innovative product breakthroughs:.
Innovation Types #1-4: “Configuration”
According to Doblin, the first four forms of the invention focus on the company's setup and all the research "behind the scenes."Although innovation forms in this group are not specifically customer-facing, as you can see in the examples below, they can have a huge effect on consumer engagement. Whether the organization and goods are structured will have a major downstream impact, encouraging advancements in certain categories.
Two of the best cases are Google and McDonald's. All businesses made internal advances that enabled their employees to further progress dramatically downstream.
In the McDonald's example, the franchisee experience that led to the launch of the Egg McMuffin inspired the company's full breakfast range, which now accounts for 25% of sales. Breakfast is now the company's most profitable segment, too.
Innovation Types #5-6: “Offering.”
When most people think about innovation, the category of offering comes to mind.
Improving product performance is a distinct but difficult type of innovation. Unless accompanied by a deeply ingrained corporate culture toward technical innovation, such advances can only create a temporary competitive advantage.
That's part of why Doblin advises that businesses concentrate on integrating many research fields— it provides a far more robust economic moat.
Apple has an innovation reputation, but the product ecosystem highlighted above is an undervalued part of the company's strategy. By focusing on the product ecosystem — and ensuring they operate together flawlessly — additional value is developed, thus making it harder for consumers to turn away from Apple products.
Innovation Types #7-10: “Experience.”
These product forms are more customer-facing, but that often renders them the most open to understanding.
Whereas other technologies appear to arise underwater, experiential developments are often evaluated by consumers. Therefore, intensive care is needed to roll out these ideas.
At best, electronic shopping was unstable in the early days of the internet — but Amazon's launch of Amazon Prime and free expedited shipments for all customers was a game-changer for e-commerce.
Executing such a pledge wasn't an easy challenge, but today there are 150 million Prime consumers globally, including those in metro areas who can get things in as few as two hours.
Making Innovations Happen in Your Organization
Why do companies handle the ten forms of creativity more tactically?
One valuable guide is Doblin 's free compilation of over 100 strategies that suit the above-mentioned structure.
The one-pager PDF offers a set of standard measurements to view through concept. Necessarily, these are all various approaches you should look at while attempting to distinguish a product or service — and at least it provides managers and advertisers with a valuable thinking exercise.
