Part 1: Definitions (10/23)
Part 2: iNPD model (11/06)
Part 3: Innovation Matrix – Categories of Innovation (11/24)
Part 4: Innovation Matrix – Areas of Innovation
Part 5: Innovation Matrix – Overall
Part 6: Process
I see 9 distinct areas companies can innovate in. These 9 areas organize into 2 broad groups I call Customer Experience and Organization Capacity (please forgive the current crudeness of my descriptions).
Customer Experience
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Product | The product, service and/or experience that the company sells and that the customer and/or user values. This can also include peripheral, complementary or accessory products. |
| Marcomm | All the messages and materials used to raise awareness, consolidate demand, and bring customers and products together. |
| Sales | The transaction experience; everything that facilitates the exchange between customers and company over the product. |
| Fulfillment | The mechanisms to fulfill the sales transaction, including distribution delivery. |
| Support | The post-transaction activities that the company provides related to the customer’s ownership of the product—in some cases the support is the product, or a significant portion of the product. |
Operational Capacity
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Finance | How the company pays for its continuance and delivery of customer experiences. |
| Process | The ways in which the company does things and makes decisions. |
| Strategy | The goals and directions a company sets for itself, the market position it takes, and the trade-offs it is willing to make. Of course Strategy occurs at many different levels, from company-wide down to product development. |
| Organization | The coherent and integrated collection or resources as well as the methods of integration and marshalling of these resource, that keep the company running and delivering customer experiences. |
It should be clear that the Customer Experience areas are all external facing and impact direct interaction with customers and users; while the Operational Capacity areas are all internal facing and impact the company’s capacity for delivering customer experiences.
It is important to note that each of these areas can have any number of incremental, sustaining, breakthrough or disruptive innovations.
These distinctions are important because each represents unique subject matters requiring unique mixtures of appropriate expertise, as well as providing guidelines for appropriate expectations and contributions. For example, design likely does not have the financial subject matter expertise to drive financial innovations, and would therefore likely not be expected to do so. Likewise engineering often lacks the mass communications expertise to drive marcomm innovations, and would therefore likely not be expected to do so.
This relates to some of the current discussion of design and innovation, and how many people conflate the two. A quick look at these areas of innovation should reveal the limits of where design and innovation currently intersect where they should intersect more, and perhaps where they should not intersect.
Design has an established history of product and marcomm innovation, and many designers are trying to establish design as a component of strategic innovation area (though mostly from a product strategy approach). However what can design contribute to distribution or support innovations? And is it even appropriate for design to be involved in finance innovations? Visually mapping these areas of innovation makes such questions easy to ask.
I recently noticed Geoffrey Moore’s new book has just been released. It delves into the topic of distinguishing between kinds of innovation and how these distinctions should guide companies’ decisions.
Further Questions
- Do the areas I have identified adequately reflect reality, without getting mired in too fine a detail?
- Are the processes for innovation different across these areas? or is it only the subject matter that differs
- Is the importance of subject matter expertise consistent across these areas?
- Can there even be an overall innovation discipline, or would such a discipline necessarily have to exist within each area?
Hi, good site, blow out patch, 8-(,