Book SummaryTen Types of Innovation, by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Ten Types of Innovation

Most authorities agree that it takes innovation to achieve spectacular success in business, but most innovation projects end in failure. Why do they fail? And more importantly, what can you do to keep your own innovations from succumbing to the same fate?

In Ten Types of Innovation, Larry Keeley, cofounder of the Doblin Innovation Firm, and his Doblin colleagues Ryan Pikkel, Brian Quinn, and Helen Walters answer these questions. Based on their experience coaching companies through innovation projects, they argue that the answer to these questions lies at least partly in knowing how to classify innovations.

They observe that there are ten fundamental types of innovation. When innovation projects fail to produce growth and profit for the company, it’s often because they...

Ten Types of Innovation Summary What Is Innovation?

It’s worth noting that the authors define an “innovation” as anything that is new or novel in its context and that contributes to making a product or service viable and profitable. So taking a technology or business model that’s widely used in one industry and applying it in a different industry where it stands out as unique counts as innovation, but copying best practices in your own industry doesn’t. And the authors view innovation as a matter of degree—the distinction between what’s innovative and what’s not isn’t always black and white.

Defining Innovation

When reading any book on innovation, it’s important to understand what exactly the author means by “innovation” because different experts define it quite differently.

Some use it to refer primarily to technological innovations. For example, in _[Crossing the...

Ten Types of Innovation Summary Classifying Innovations

The authors group their ten types of innovation into three categories: Those related to your product directly, those related to how you configure your company, and those related to managing your customers’ perceptions of your product and company. We’ll discuss the types in each category in turn.

Product-Related Innovations

The authors identify only two types of innovation directly related to your product or service: innovations related to your core product, and innovations related to how it fits into a larger system of products.

Core Product Innovations

This type of innovation includes anything that improves your product or service itself. That could mean adding features that increase its capabilities, removing features to make it simpler and more user-friendly, tailoring it to better meet a certain user’s needs, or just producing it to a higher standard of quality.

Of course, to qualify as “innovation,” the changes need to make it stand out as unique. The authors caution that this type of innovation, by itself, usually makes the least difference in long-term profitability because core product improvements are relatively easy for other companies to copy. And as...

Ten Types of Innovation Summary Why Innovation Projects Fail and How to Succeed

The authors identify a number of reasons that innovation projects fail, most of which they explain in terms of the ten types of innovation that we’ve just covered: A project can fail because it doesn’t incorporate enough types of innovation, tries to incorporate too many types at once, or focuses on the wrong types.

Problem: Insufficient Scope of Innovation

According to the authors, the most common problem with innovation projects is that they aren’t bold enough: They don’t change anything enough to make a difference for your customers because they focus on minor improvements that include only one or two of the 10 types of innovation. Thus, even if they succeed in developing an improved product, they fail to generate new value for your company.

Solution: Implement at Least Five Types of Innovation

The authors' solution to this problem is to think big: Tackle the difficult problems that nobody else is addressing and employ several types of innovation to build a solution that’s unique and difficult to copy. They assert that most historically significant innovation projects involved at least five of the 10 types of innovation.

**Contrasting Perspectives on Why...

Shortform Exercise: Apply the Ten Types of Innovation

In this exercise, you’ll consider how you could apply some of the principles from The Ten Types of Innovation to your own projects.

Think of an innovation project you’ve recently worked on or are planning to work on either in business or personal life. Which of the ten types of innovation did it involve?