In 1999, a Chicago based consulting firm called Doblin categorized Business Innovation into ten types. This framework, that has become increasingly popular as an standard for innovation classification, categorizes the innovations into four different areas: Finance, Process, Offering and Delivery depending on what area of the business is impacted by innovation.
Under the finance category we find ways in which we organize our company for maximum benefit under two different categories:
- Business model, that is, how does your company make money.
- Networking, meaning how you partner with other companies in order to achieve mutual benefit.
Under process we find process innovation under two more categories:
- Enabling processes related to all those processes that support the company´s core processes and activities
- And the Core processes themselves.
Offering is the category that is more usually coming to mind when thinking about innovation as it is related with the creation of new products and services under three different categories:
- Product performance or how do we design new products as part of our core product offering that will give us a competitive advantage in the marketplace
- Product systems meaning how do we organize/arrange our product offering under one or several product platforms providing common look and feel, consistency of approach, opportunities for volume leverage, …
- Service or how do we complement our product offering and provide value to our customers with an additional service offering beyond and around our products.
Finally the delivery category where we focus on how we make our products and services available to customers:
- Channels or how we get our offerings to the market using the most effective channels for maximum reach and coverage of our desired customer base
- Brand or how do we communicate this offering and create an image of our company and products for our customers.
- And finally customer experience, innovating around the way customers feel when they interact with our products and services.
In the attached chart you will find examples of companies that at some point were considered to be best practices in each one of the Innovation categories. Where are you in these innovation categories? What should be the targeted ones in your company and what can you do yourself to drive innovation?
