Innovation Strategy – Are you ready for all types of innovations?

These are my initial thoughts on the points which should be taken into account when an organization is preparing their innovation strategy. I am sure with your discussions and inputs, these thoughts will get fine tuned over time.

I would like to define or classify different types of innovations as following :

As organizations increase in size, they should prepare themselves for all three types of innovations.  

Internal R&D team can focus on incremental innovations. Innovation managers, with broader outlook and diverse technical skills, should be responsible for breakthrough innovations. The managers should go beyond their technical domain and look for technologies which can be integrated with the existing product line. If we look at Apple products, they brought flash memory created by Toshiba for their iconic iPod. Then they integrated the touch screen technology and lot more. An organization should always try to make their product better and in addition to the internal R&D, they should keep on looking for technologies developed outside. The technologies which are difficult to integrate can be used to get inspiration for the product development by internal R&D team.

The job of innovation manager should also include tracking the alternative solutions that are being developed to cater the same need as of their products. Disruptive Innovations come as a real threat and can take you out of business. They are also generally not tracked much. However, they should be monitored on a frequent basis and their progress should be reported to the Strategy team for decision making. The key to success lies in identifying the successful innovations early and acquiring such companies.

This is just an overview. My next articles will discuss these thoughts in details with case studies. I welcome all the suggestions and inputs.