Sometimes, the term "innovation" can seem like a buzzword with no meaning that is thrown around by top Innovation consulting firms.

How can you describe what innovation means concretely today?

Innovation is creating something new and competitive in its form. (Later, I will discuss that there are multiple definitions of innovation.) However, this doesn't mean that innovation is still a scary concept: it brings unwanted disruptive changes that introduce new unforeseen problems that you may be unprepared to handle. You can explain this motivation around holding innovation back with various stories of companies that throttle their innovation:

• Kodak: they discovered digital photography in the 1970s but they decline to use digital photography to prevent innovation from cannibalizing their photography business.
• SlingTV: was limited advertising by Dish Network to prevent the streaming service from cannibalizing their satellite business.

Many understand these previous examples of product disruption or innovation as they are well-known for holding back innovative products to their demerit. However, we should ask ourselves, "Do we can hold back innovation within our organization and if so, what ways?

While there are plenty of innovation management consulting firms that can help your organization stay more". Yes, the status quo is safe but it's not how the market functions.

Understandably, innovation is a disruptive market force that brings elements of change that bring unforeseen problems for digital products such as:

• Premature scaling
• Cyberattacks (depending on what industry you are in)
• or even just some broken code that causes real (brand) damage online.

Despite that, the market is always fluctuating with new ways to be efficient and thus, competitive. While it introduces unforeseen problems, it can also bring untold opportunities.

While it can be easy to hear about the story about how Kodak neglected to use their digital camera that would disrupt sales, the truth is that the innovation couldn't have been held back long enough. Since the advent of digital video, many businesses took advantage of that very same innovation that Kodak declined to use. Many other companies took advantage of digital video in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine.

• Flickr was a photo-sharing site launched in the 2000s that helped amateur photographers share their professional pictures online - which was acquired by Yahoo! for $22-$25 million.
• Instagram remains a photo-sharing application that was acquired for approximately $1 billion by its 2 founders.

It's important to understand that these platforms had different channels and even a Business Model to take advantage of the market shift. Being innovative is about thinking about problems in a different, strategic way - given the resources that are available to you. Even in past examples such as the famous stories behind Netflix with Blockbuster or Kodak can offer us hindsight; today, innovation is a greater impetus to innovate even more because of:

• constant market changes
• market competition

While even introducing the concept of "constant innovation" into your organization can be a heavy undertaking, it is necessary for a market against smart, competitive, high-energy organizational teams, you must remember innovation doesn't have to be large-scale or disruptive. Instead, it can be even applied internally in how you run a business online so you can be even more efficient and more competitive. There may be several redundancies or bottlenecks within your organization that can be either remedied, refine, or even automated.

You find that there is a bottleneck within your organization's:

• chatbot dialogue tree that takes longer to deliver a product recommendation for your customers.
• an onboarding process that can be more seamless so you can onboard more users.
• a process that can be better automated or even color-coded for easier internal use.

Innovation is a method of strategic problem solving so that you can tackle problems better.

In this article, you will learn:

• what are 3 basic types of innovation
• basic methods to how you can implement those types of innovation within your organization
• and finally, how to employ innovation within your organization consistently.

What are the 3 Types of Innovation?

While there are many definitions of innovation. as ,this article goes in-depth about the different types of innovation such as:

• radical innovation
• incremental innovation
• market innovation
• and many more.

Too often, most startups consider innovation to be "discovering a wholly new concept" but rather ignore why innovation is so necessary:

• to solve market problems and
• provide market needs.

Without considering those two factors, you would be chasing innovation for novelty's sake.

This situation leads to wasting (hopefully) just weeks on developing an unvalidated startup concept that the market has no demand for. You must understand that this article is more focused on helping you apply 3 types of innovation into your business in an actionable way that you can measure:

• product innovation
• process innovation
• business model innovation

Below are the 3 key ways to be innovative - with the first type of innovation being: product.

What is Product Innovation and How Can We Deploy It?

Product innovation is when you innovative something useful about a product within an existing product category. This can even mean introducing a new feature that makes the wider range of products perform better. Product innovation is a necessary aspect that needs to be taken seriously by your organization. One of the main reasons that the market is constantly changing is product innovation. Taking this into account, we are competing against other products to solve the same market need. However, product innovation is not just limited to competing against other products within the same product category, it's also that you are constantly competing with the past version of your product. Because we are always living in a world there is always constantly updating and improving both against the competition's product and the past version of your product. There are even a few examples of product innovation as you can see listed below:

• In software, it is the constant updates of the product.
• In hardware, it's the newer version of the headphones.
• In media, it's the new season of a show on a streaming service.

There are always improvements being made to products to constantly improve, all the time.

However, ,with the advent of agile product development, products are always constantly improving both against the competition and the past version of your working product. Several innovation consulting firms help you see where your product can be drastically improved and made even more competitive. However, the most surprising part is that you don't need your product to practice product innovation, as:

• You can notice different market problems with another product - for example, you can hear a common complaint about the product itself that remains to be unchanged by that company.
• You can notice different useability problems with another product - for example, you notice an aspect with the product that makes it harder or a lesser-favored experience to use overall.
• You can notice different onboarding processes with another product - you've noticed that the user experience is lacking during a certain aspect of another digital product.

You can apply product innovation within your organization by:

• looking for the common social sentiment (social media comments and its marketplace review scores) about your competitor's product on its faults to build a better, more competitive product within the marketplace.
• to use user surveys so you can understand how your product fits within your end user's life or thought processes.
• to use SaaS assistant tools like heatmaps to see your end users are ending up on your digital product and you can customize the layout of your digital product to be more intuitive.

One way of practicing product innovation is working with an innovation strategy consulting firm. Collaborating with these firms can help your organization keep your products innovative and competitive as your business scales into a larger organization with the product becoming less of one of the core responsibilities.

What is Process Innovation and How I Can Deploy It?

The second method of innovation is creating an innovative process to run the management, upkeeping, or with any internal process of the organization to be more functional and more competitive. With process innovation, the impact of leveraging this practice is more of a question of scale. For example:

• On a smaller scale, the focus is to automate a small bottleneck within one of your processes so your business can be faster. A good example would be reducing 3 steps to onboard a new user to 1 step for faster conversions.
• On a larger scale, a great example is Lean Manufacturing with how Toyota manufactures cars against the industrial-scale manufacturing process that the Big 3 car manufacturing used behemoths at the time.

Process innovation is built on one principle: equal or more input with lesser output. By using process innovation, you reduce waste within your organization and capture the that was probably lost due to inefficient:

• On a smaller scale, your end-user has to go through 3 steps instead of 1 step to becoming a newly registered member.
• On a larger scale, you waste $10,000s maintaining inefficiencies to give you no time to capture larger opportunities at the time.

One method of process innovation that comes to mind is the agile methodology through the Agile Manifesto for the software industry in the 1990s in terms of product development. I've talked more about the advent the agile project management ,in this article. To make a long story here, one of the larger problems within the software industry is that they developed software that never got released for various reasons:

• the value of the software product was diminished by the time of its release.
• the market demands had changed.

Its founding principle rests on: "working product over comprehensive specifications". Before then, the software has been using a product development process that worked very well for products with longer development cycles - however, it was insufficient to create products that needed to be released sooner. Through the Agile Manifesto, many different innovative reiterations arose from that methodology:

• agile project management: when you managed projects with a one-step-at-a-time approach while remaining open to incoming data that can change the direction of the project.
• agile program management: a management approach to managing multiple projects together to work and function congruently to serve a specific aim. Because of this, you can better determine which projects are worth continuing and which ones are worth furthering.
• agile product development: a product approach that prevents you from spending months (or even years) when it comes to developing products to no market fanfare. Agile allows you to make sure that you are creating a new product that the market wants is cost-effective while keeping costs low.

Because of the Agile Manifesto, there are frameworks available that you can leverage to launch your product cost-effectively within the marketplace:

• Scrum: an Agile approach geared to release products faster with short, intense, hands-on sprints with the Product Manager removing obstacles that could derail or prevent the expedient release of the product.
• Kanban: a visual and transparent way to completion of tasks throughout a team so that everyone can see it. This method allows you to track required tasks in real-time.
• Lean: an Agile development methodology directly inspired by Toyota's Lean Manufacturing concept to develop software products while reducing waste, creating useful information to use, focus on quality from the beginning, promote the fast release, keep the morale high with your team, focus on developing the product without wasting time on making decisions, and keep the process running efficiently.

Process innovation is an innovation that you can use to unlock value that was locked up or even regarded as waste initially. However, if process innovation is something that you don't quite understand, there are innovation strategy consulting services that can help you remove bottlenecks within your process that you are unaware of to make your organization more efficient.

What is Business Model Innovation and How Can I Deploy it?

The last key innovation that your organization needs to be more aware of is the Business Model Innovation. What makes this type of innovation is more insidious than the process innovation is that an innovative business model affects practically everything on how your organization operates and functions. When this type of innovation occurs, it changes priorities, focuses, and even well-established strategies on its head. A classic example is "Amazon versus Barnes & Noble" as it competed against a larger reseller with an innovative business model - along with newer technology. Barnes & Noble leveraged a franchise model where the more stores it created, the more profit that was generated.

Amazon, however, did not use a franchise model to generate profit. Instead, it used an online shopping model to deliver its books to its end users. However, Amazon had far less time convincing customers to use its website after enough habit-forming while Barnes & Noble's franchise model was too very large to move against the digital book reseller. Barnes & Noble relied more on customers fighting passive inability to move to go to the bookstore and hopefully, decide to get another book. Amazon, however, relied on a business model that didn't require the customer to drive to a bookstore. Instead, it relied on being more available to the customer - even during times when Barnes & Nobel wasn't available.

This doesn't account for the overhead that Barnes & Noble had to uphold against Amazon. Amazon was competing on a whole another scale. Today, Amazon is, by far, more accessible than its brick-and-mortar counterpart where they are only available at certain times of doing.

Business model innovation is a type of key innovation that enables you to compete more strategically against a larger competitor - while using fewer resources to fulfill a goal more efficiently to achieve either a similar output or a larger-scale output.

An innovative business model enables your organization to operate more lean methods and processes while using fewer resources and maximizing output to take advantage of opportunities. Today, Amazon delivers products to your door while Barnes & Noble only followed that trend that was established by Amazon. Earlier, we even talked about another form of business model innovation with Kodak and the other digital photo-based firms that are taking advantage of digital photography in ways that Kodak could have never imagined at the time. One way to experiment with business model innovation is to implement a new internal technology that provides the same quality output, costs less, and offers more scale.

The driving force behind business model innovation is to see where you can reduce waste when it comes to your revenue operations.

• "what can reduce your overhead while providing the same or higher quality output for your organization?"
• "what are processes that are being manually handled by we can apply automation too?"
• "what is a less costly method of delivering the same or high-quality product?"

In short, business model innovation requires you to ask questions about where your business model can be streamlined. Today, many top innovation firms like Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) preached about the stories of companies that don't use innovation to stay competitive and move forward. With that said, business model innovation is a type of innovation that should not be overlooked.

"How to Deploy Innovation Consistently"

One of the larger misconceptions about innovation is that it requires that you create something revolutionary that can revolutionize the world. However, any reputably professional innovation management service consultant would tell you, "Innovation is a process." Because it's a process, you can implement these changes repeatedly and over and over again, consistently within your organization. While the below example focuses on product innovation, you can also readily apply this innovation method for process innovation and business model innovation.

• View Use Cases: To practice innovation, you have to understand that world from your customers' perspectives. One of the best ways to empathize with your end-user is to understand the use cases on how your product interacts with them when they use it. You can see the bottlenecks more easily and remedy them as you see them from your customer's perspective.
• Have a Clear Definition of the Problem: Another factor is to deploy innovation more responsibility is to (always) have a clear definition of the problem. By understanding the problem more clearly, you can leverage innovation to solve a specific problem that meets market demands.
• Create a Concept that Can Work: Create a concept that is practical and somewhat grounded in how your product would function. It doesn't (and shouldn't) be large but rather small enough to build: i.e. an MVP.
• Build a Structured Prototype: Build a structured prototype (an MVP) that your end users can use interactively. Using what you've learned from user research, competition research, and market research, you can systematize building innovative products that outcompete your competition and surpass market demands in direct specific ways.
• Test the Solution and Gather Data: Launch your product to see how your solution works and gather data on improving your product, process, or even your business model to make that product more effective.

Constant market changes in various industries require innovative thinking. However, it doesn't surmise in 1 great idea but rather than a systematized, reliable approach that you can use to "disrupt your organization" by removing bottlenecks and possible rework within your organization to:

• enable a seamless, more intuitive way of internal communication to foster a faster exchange of ideas through easier communication interfaces.
• remove a once-thought-necessary overhead to capture opportunities in the market while wasting even fewer resources.

This is a type of innovation that you can implement every day. Innovation is a constant process and by leveraging that process, your organization can always stay competitive.

However, if you are having trouble:

• trying to remain competitive to not be disrupted but also
• while also remaining innovative at the same time to take advantage of opportunities and growth for your organization

Then, feel free to speak with me in a free no-obligation session ,by clicking here.

Also, Feel Free To Check Out 4 Articles:

• What is the Right Time to Hire a Product Manager for Your Startup?
• What is Good UX? Is it Related to Good UI?
• Why Agile is the Only Way That Will Really Work for Your Startup
• The Lean Startup: Why it's Crucial to Your Startup Success