I talk a lot about how innovation work is different if you
are developing an incremental innovation vs a truly breakthrough product.
As you can expect, the question then comes up about how a breakthrough product
should be defined. This is a great question, and Ive done a lot of
thinking about it. Whats interesting is that the definition can change
if you take an internal company perspective, vs a market perspective, so Ill
try to reconcile why these differences may exist.
From a market oriented perspective, a true breakthrough is a
product (or service, or other type of offering) that enables people to access
benefits that would otherwise be out of reach. Sometimes we see this
happen through products that have been incrementally improved to the point that
the originally intended benefits are finally accessible to the intended
consumers. Other times, this happens when a technology or category is
created that makes all existing alternatives obsolete.
This is why it can be confusing to define a breakthrough
from an internal company perspective. Inside a company, an incremental
improvement may not be seen as a breakthrough innovation, even though it may be
the point at which the market is finally disrupted. This is why I choose
to take the market perspective, since an innovation is ultimately judged by its
impact on the market. A breakthrough disrupts a market dynamic. It
doesnt really matter how you get there, but it does matter that you understand
your market well enough to identify the dynamics you want to disrupt, and
intentionally develop products that will achieve that goal.