Innovation

What is innovation? My understanding of innovation is coming up with new, valuable ideas and thoughts. The article, "The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate" explains that innovation is about new value, not new things. For example, there are so many apps that have the same purpose. Dating apps and websites are all created with the intent to help someone find a significant other. Every time a new dating app comes out, it isn't really a new product or totally new idea, but it still provides value, which makes it innovative. There are a lot of mobile games with the same concept, but because the character or the visual design is different, it becomes valuable. Since people have different preferences on how an app functions or looks, it will still be innovative even if the general idea has been done before. According to the article, these differences could be considered customer experience or processes innovation. This was my original understanding of how innovation worked, but after reading this article, I see that there are several other ways to innovate in a business.

Prior to reading this article, I always thought of innovation as an external process. I see that there is a lot more that can happen internally that would also be considered innovation. I never thought of changing the supply chain as something that would be innovative. Being able to change your process and where you get your materials from could really affect productivity. This idea of changing the process could definitely be considered as a new idea that brings value. The article talks about how Zara shortened their design-to-retail cycle to only 15 days, which helps increase productivity and most likely profitability as well.

I also find it interesting that there are multiple areas of innovation that can be attacked with one idea. Someone could offer a totally new product that would create a whole new market with customers who never knew they needed something like this. This type of product would fall under the customers, offerings, and possibly solutions dimensions of innovation. Ideally, it would be best to come up with an innovative idea that would address all of the dimensions or as many as possible.