Sample frameDay 193·Innovation · Types

Innovation has ten addresses. Almost everything you've shipped was posted to the same one.

Innovation.

The Ten Types

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Take the last three things your business genuinely changed — not the tweaks, the changes — and place each one: was it the product itself, or was it how you charge, who you build it with, how the work gets done, how it reaches the buyer, what it feels like to be your customer? If you already know all three land in the same place, you don't have an innovation problem — you have a range problem, and that one's cheaper to fix.

The idea

Larry Keeley co-founded Doblin, the Chicago innovation firm, with the design methodologist Jay Doblin, and in 1998 he set out a taxonomy the firm had built by dissecting what successful innovations were actually made of. It has ten types, and it was expanded into a book in 2013, Ten Types of Innovation, written with Ryan Pikkel, Brian Quinn and Helen Walters. The ten fall into three groups. Configuration covers profit model, network, structure and process — how the business is put together and how it makes its money. Offering covers product performance and product system — the thing you sell and the things around it. Experience covers service, channel, brand and customer engagement — how it reaches people and what dealing with you feels like. That's one type for how well the product performs, and nine for everything else. The framework's central claim, drawn from years of taking successful innovations apart, is that the ones that lasted almost never sat in a single type. The durable ones combined several at once, which is also what makes them awkward to copy: a rival can match a feature inside a quarter, but can't match a feature plus a pricing model plus a channel without rebuilding itself.

The framework

01
The ten, in three groups.
Configuration is the machine behind the offering: profit model, meaning how you charge and for what; network, meaning who you do it with; structure, meaning how your people and assets are organised; process, meaning how the work actually gets done. Offering is the narrow part: product performance and product system, the thing itself and what surrounds it. Experience is the front: service, channel, brand, customer engagement. Read the list slowly once, marking as you go. Most people find four or five of the ten haven't once been the subject of a meeting.
02
Score the category before you score yourself.
Go type by type and mark where competitors have moved over the last few years, then mark your own moves alongside. This is the strategy-canvas move out of blue ocean strategy, run on fixed rails: Kim and Mauborgne ask you to invent the axes your category competes on, which is a project. Doblin hands you the same ten axes in every category, which makes this a scan you can finish before lunch. You end up with a map of where innovation is expensive and where it's cheap, and it runs opposite to instinct — the empty types are empty because nobody in the category counts them as innovation at all.
03
Which type does your team reach for without being asked?
There'll be one, and in most businesses it's product performance, for reasons that have nothing to do with strategy. It has an obvious owner. It briefs easily: build this, ship it by then. Progress on it is visible in a demo, which makes it comfortable to report. And it's the type a competitor can copy fastest, so the effort you can most easily authorise happens to buy the advantage that decays quickest. Name the default out loud in the room, then require that any proposal arriving from it comes paired with one from a different group.
04
One type is a feature. Three is a business a rival has to become.
The instruction from the framework isn't to spread yourself thinly across all ten; it's to choose a small combination and design them together. A new profit model, supported by a channel nobody else in the category uses, served by a support model that only that channel makes possible, is a different proposition from any one of those three on its own. Pick three, sketch how each reinforces the other two, then check the join: if you can lift one out and the others still stand unchanged, you've got three projects rather than one innovation.

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