Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

Acknowledgments

Our colleagues at Doblin have been obsessed with finding the frontiers of effective innovation for three decades. Ten of us are adjunct professors at Chicago’s famed Institute of Design, a leading global graduate design school. This helps us select and cultivate a steady stream of talented young colleagues. Collectively through the years more than 400 people have worked at Doblin, far too many to mention here, and many of them made important contributions to the emerging science of innovation effectiveness. We are indebted to them all, and grateful for their work.

Several individuals were particularly important in developing the original Ten Types of Innovation discoveries in 1998. Vijay Kumar, one of the world’s leading methodologists in design, who recently published an important book of his own, used several of his robust methods to lead the research.1 Other disciplined and talented key contributors were Jeff Barr, Ewan Duncan, John Pipino, Tomoko Ichikawa, and Peter Laundy; the latter two led the important design work that made the ideas compelling and understandable.

We have reinvested in the analytics around the Ten Types of Innovation at many critical junctures. In particular, some brilliant library scientists helped develop the search algorithms that would allow us to use the Ten Types diagnostically, such as the Innovation Landscapes in Part Four, including Marilyn Brda, Tracey Lemon, and Matthew Robison. Others such as Ben Jacobson, Kim Erwin, Katie McGlenn, ...