#019 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
The Ten Types of Innovation
Design December - Drifting into January as I didn’t get everything out that I wanted to.
I’ve written a bit about my Masters of Design Methods degree. My design school experience was not about art, colors, layouts, or fonts. Instead, it focused on Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership, along with many research models based on repeatable methods. Before I end Design December, I want to speak about the final model that helps to ensure the completeness of a vision. As technical leaders, it is so easy to forget that your creations need more than just technical acumen. Luckily, the Ten Types of Innovation has an area dedicated to us but also asks us to include Designers and Business people in the creation and implementation of our ideas. The Ten Types of Innovation is a nearly 25-year-old methodology that helps ensure the inclusion of typical stakeholders, which enables us to create robust services and lets us measure ourselves against our competitors. Like the Balanced Breakthrough model from last week, this stems from groundbreaking research and delivery from Larry Keely and our friends at Doblin. Let’s dive in.
Ten Types, a brief overview
From the image above, you can see three main broad categories of Configuration in blue, Offering in gold, and Experience in red. Looking further you will see that Configuration has 4 categories, Offering has 2, and Experience has 4. When fostering innovation, as Larry says, we need to create“... bolder concepts, that are easier to implement and harder to copy.” We do this by using each of the 3 colored groups and 5 or more tactics. When we do this well, we create a better and more profitable business and offering for ourselves and our customers. Let’s dive into each of these 3 areas just a bit more.
Configuration
The tactics in this area are taught in MBA programs and are the building blocks for business. With the 4 types of Innovation: Profit Model, Network, Structure, and Process we explore the different ways we organize the delivery of our offering to the marketplace. Including how we price our offering, how we go to market, where we acquire our offering, how we might produce it, and so many more. I have linked the complete list of tactics here for you to explore.[1]
Offering
The Offering area is mostly taught in university Engineering programs. These types of Product Performance and Product System, ask us to explore what is possible with new technical innovations. What can we do today, that we could not do yesterday, and further, what competitive unfair advantage do we have over our competitors? What kind of new experiences can we create for our users, and what elegant integration can we deliver to make a platform, more on Platforms in just a bit.
Experience
Finally, Experience skills are taught in Social Science or Design schools. Across these four types of innovation: Services, Channel, Brand, and Customer Engagement we focus on the User Experience but also sprinkle in brand-building ideas. With Services, we explore how we might more thoroughly and robustly engage with our customers, via loyalty or rewards programs as an example. Channel, has us exploring how we will go to market and which partners we might align with. Again explore all of the tactics with this link[1]. Also, remember you need at least 5 tactics across all 3 colors.
Creating Leading Platforms
I mentioned the idea of Platforms above and wanted to explore that a bit. The Ten Types of Innovation is a great method to develop a robust platform for your offering or service. As we enter into a new era of innovation and development, and as Mauro Porcini, the Chief Design Officer at Pepsi says, we are entering an “Age of Excellence.” With a new experience just a swipe away, delivering robust, well-thought-out ideas into the marketplace is key to surviving the long tail of innovation. Delivering “... bolder concepts, that are easier to implement and harder to copy”, will be the key driver for successful companies moving forward.
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell
[1] Ten Types of Innovation Tactics:
https://doblin.com/dist/images/uploads/TenTypesInnovation.pdf
[2] One of the several great talks by Larry Talking about the Ten Types of Innovation, enjoy