What Exactly Is Innovation?
Innovation is one of the most bandied about terms in global business today, but exactly what it means can be nebulous. Since this is a blog about innovation, I thought it important for the first post to define how I think firms and entrepreneurs should view innovation. Innovation can be described in different ways, though…
Words: Original, unexpected, fresh, never been thought of before, never been seen before, creative, new, useful
Reactions: “Isn’t that clever?”, “What a great idea!”, and “Why didn’t anyone ever think of doing it before?”
Descriptions: Challenging conventional notions of how things have been done before, and bringing ideas from one industry to another, or from one geographic region to another
Strategic Criteria such as:
Creating meaningful points of difference for products and services vs. current alternatives
Fulfilling unmet consumer needs, by offering new ways to accomplish goals, or make lives or jobs easier, better, happier, more exciting, satisfying, or more productive
Enabling brands to compete in incremental new markets or category segments
Delighting/engaging/capturing imaginations of consumers to increase loyalty
The best new products and services frequently offer a number of innovative characteristics/features/attributes and customer “touchpoints” in combination. Apple AAPL +3.31% products are innovative aesthetically in terms of design, material, and often color; They’re innovative in terms of product features such as voice recognition, tactile responsiveness, and synchronicity between devices; They’re innovative in terms of customer touchpoints such as no-wait checkout through sales associate enabled iPhones, the Genius Bar to help solve customer problems on the spot, and the plentiful in-store devices that are inviting, and easy and fun to try and learn more about.
Source:https://www.forbes.com/sites/michellegreenwald/2014/03/12/what-exactly-is-innovation/#554dfccc5e5a
