In Search of Innovation
For almost two decades, FountainBlue has been facilitating leadership and innovation for the FountainBlue community and beyond. Through this work, we’ve found that many companies are ostensibly saying that they are investing in innovation, but are not actually doing so.
For example, delivering incremental improvements to make their products and solutions more efficient, more effective, more thorough, more connected, more versatile, more distributed, or less buggy. I believe that allocating funds for incremental innovation is a necessary part of doing business, but ideally, leaders and managers are also investing in innovation projects.
Many companies are expanding their products, services, technologies and applications to across markets, industries, platforms, users, geographies, use cases, etc. Allocating funds for these orthogonal extensions is a strategic part of expanding the business, but innovation is arguably just as critical.
The hypothesis for my upcoming white paper on innovation is that there are two different types of innovation: intentional and transformational and unintentional yet transformational.
As unintentional transformations aren’t planned by definition, the emphasis on the white paper is on intentional innovations. There are three types of intentional innovations:
Problem-based innovations: based on markets, customer demands, unmet needs and societal developments
Technology-based innovations: driven by the creation and expansion of foundational technologies with a wide range of adaptations/use cases
Business-driven innovations: an organization recruits the innovators, buys the organizations, or manages and integrates the processes which lead to an innovation at scale
The white paper will showcase the recent and transformational problem-based innovations and technology-based innovations of the past two decades plus the innovation opportunities ahead. With a target release of Fall 2024, use case submissions are welcomed and appreciated.
It is our hope that the white paper will connect the leaders and innovators of today with the best practices to fuel the innovations of tomorrow.