Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

Chapter 2

The Ten Types

An Overview

The Ten Types framework is simple and intuitive. It is a useful tool you can use both to diagnose and enrich an innovation you’re working on, or to analyze existing competition. It makes it especially easy to spot errors of omission—missing dimensions that will make a concept stronger.

The Ten Types framework is structured into three color-coded categories. The types on the left side of the framework are the most internally focused and distant from customers; as you move toward the right side, the types become increasingly apparent and obvious to end users. To use a theatrical metaphor, the left of the framework is backstage; the right is onstage.

Several lessons will emerge from the Ten Types throughout this book—including how to use the framework as a way to identify opportunities, and how to use it to construct sophisticated, defensible innovations.

Configuration

These types of innovation are focused on the innermost workings of an enterprise and its business system

Offering

These types of innovation are focused on an enterprise’s core product or service, or a collection of its products and services

Experience

These types of innovation are focused on more customer-facing elements of an enterprise and its business system

This is not a process timeline, nor does it imply sequencing or hierarchy amongst the types. Any combination of types ...