Corporate Innovation Models
How can you innovate successfully so you don't fall behind?
Truly successful innovation is never easy to accomplish.
As much as the myths of innovation and fables of inventors have led us all to believe that creativity arrives with a brilliant flash of inspiration, the reality is that the successful innovative products and services we see are the culmination of tremendously hard work, a great deal of failure, and endless iteration.
The most successful innovative products are often heralded for their most apparent innovative surface characteristics, such as their industrial design or unique interaction models. Unfortunately, this simplifies what is really happening with these breakthrough products that enable their fantastic success in the market and their resilient defense against the competition.
These successful organizations are not simply innovating along one or two dimensions with such products and services. They have intentionally created compound innovation models to evolve and disrupt the existing experience ecosystem along multiple dimensions simultaneously.
To compete in today’s competitive marketplace with its accelerating rate of change and disruption, an organization must be capable of creating a robust model for forging compound innovation. First, a sustainable, successful innovation process must exist at the intersection of Strategy, Insights, and Capabilities.
Unguided, free-form innovation can certainly yield interesting discoveries, which may be an appropriate approach for university researchers and well-funded R&D organizations.
However, business organizations can rarely afford to invest in innovation programs that may never yield a return. To significantly increase your chances of execution success, innovation must be:
Guided by business and product strategy
Inspired by customer insights and marketplace opportunities
Grounded in technology and talent capabilities
Next, you must develop a compound model of innovation that identifies the multiple dimensions along which innovation can be created to ultimately forge a successfully innovative product and/or service that dominates the market. It is very difficult for a competitor to unseat you when you have multiple layers of innovation like this.
An example
For example, Apple’s amazing success with its hardware and software ecosystem is a tribute to this compound innovation model. Apple products would not be the market leaders they are today if they were simply innovating along one or two dimensions, such as the device's industrial design or the iOS software's features.
Carefully examine what Apple accomplished; you will see they brought multiple dimensions of innovations together to shake up the market dramatically. To name just a few:
Technological innovation in hardware (e.g., Retina display) and software (e.g., App Store)
Visual design and interaction design innovation (e.g., touchscreen gestures)
Channel innovation (e.g., a unique agreement with music companies, beautiful Apple Store experiences)
Business strategy innovation (e.g., song pricing, AT&T partnership)
Insights innovation (e.g., vast amounts of mobile data flowing back from consumers)
Brand and marketing innovation (e.g., aspirational brand experiences that lead people to wait in line for days for new product launches)
Now, does every innovation along every single dimension need to be an earth-shattering, disruptive force?
No, not at all.
However, if you do this well enough, delivering synergistic innovations means it is even more difficult for a competitor to attack you along just one or two dimensions. Many competitors continue to attack Apple’s products by creating devices with more features at a lower price, tablets and laptops with more open software at a lower price, and smartphones that replicate touchscreen experiences in a sexy industrial design.
But, what they could not replicate is the holistic product and service experience ecosystem that Apple created with its compound innovation model. Even now, competitors still try and fail.
Your Innovation Capabilities
You can begin this process today to assess your organization’s level of excellence and innovation capabilities for each of these dimensions relative to your competitors. Some examples of questions you should ask and be able to answer:
Vision: Who do you want to be?
Mission: What is your purpose?
Goals: What problem will you solve, or what new opportunity are you creating?
Strategy: How can you do it better than anyone else?
Talent: Have you hired the right people, and are you organized to succeed?
Technology: What is possible?
Execution: Are your processes helping or hurting your ability to innovate and execute?
Capabilities: What can you create and deliver?
Consumers: Who are they, and what are their unmet wants and needs?
Channels: Are there new and better ways to reach customers and partners?
Market: Can you stop “chasing the puck” and instead envision where the industry is heading?
Insights: What do you know that is helping you identify new opportunities?
Reach out if you’re interested in hosting me for an innovation workshop with your organization!
About me
I'm Dr. Larry Cornett, a leadership coach, fractional leader, and business consultant. I founded Brilliant Forge LLC as a consulting practice to help organizations focus their consumer insights, product vision, business strategy, and technology capabilities into new business opportunities.
With over 20 years of experience in the Silicon Valley tech industry, ranging from small startups to large global corporations, I've been recognized in the industry for my best practices and knowledge of designing and launching products and services for Consumer Markets.
Prior to launching Brilliant Forge, I was the founder and CEO of Voicekick, Inc. Our focus was on mobile app development, including a micro-podcasting app (Voicekick) and a video marketing app (Pearl).
Before that, I was a product and design executive with decades of experience designing, defining, and building consumer products at several technology and internet companies, including Apple Computer, Yahoo, eBay, and IBM.
I was the Vice President of Consumer Products for Yahoo! Search, leading an incredible team of product managers, designers, and developers focused on creating world-class Search experiences to compete with Google and Bing.
I began my career at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory while in the graduate program at Rice University in Houston, designing database and development tools. I returned to Rice to complete my doctorate and then moved to the California Bay Area to work as a designer for Apple Computer. I worked on the Finder for Mac OS 8, OS 9, and OS X, as well as Internationalization and Localization software.
After many memorable years at Apple, I left to join several ex-Apple and ex-Sun folks at a startup (Ridge Technologies) during the infamous Silicon Valley Boom.
After a few acquisitions, spin-outs, and restarts, I founded MindSpan Design, an interaction design agency. I worked on desktop, web, and mobile solutions for various startups for several years until the Bust.
Then, I joined eBay to lead a talented team focused on multiple products for vertical shopping experiences (e.g., eBay Motors, Half.com, Kijiji), platform solutions, and eBay's international sites. This included moving to Shanghai, China, to work with the local team to define and launch several new products and optimize the Product and Design organizations.
I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from Rice University, with an emphasis on Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction. While there, I designed and developed a coaching system for training software users to become more effective and efficient in their daily use of productivity software. I hold several patents, which include design work on web-based products and hardware solutions.
