Three Different Types of Innovation

Historically two sources of innovation distinguished companies’ strategies: technology push and market-pull innovation.

In the last decades the world experienced significant changes, seeing postmodern consumers buying meanings rather than products. From this scenario, a third approach was born: design driven innovation.

Technology Push: Blackberry 

Mike Lazaridis

BlackBerry is a great example of techno push innovation, which is mainly related to functionality and efficiency. BlackBerry’s Founder and Vice Chairman Mike Lazaridis donated  $45.8 million to University of Waterloo for Quantum mechanics research, a technology on which most cell phone devices are based on today. BlackBerry was a technology push innovation because new inventions were pushed onto the market, starting from R&D, but without proper consideration of whether or not they satisfy market needs.

Today, the companies that play a major role in this ground are those that have huge and long-term investments in R&D more oriented towards techno-scientific fields such as telecommunication and healthcare firms.

  

Market Pull: Newspapers and Magazines

If the technology push represents a proactive approach, the market pull is a reaction to the market and its specific needs. The newspapers and magazine industry is a perfect example because in this field the demand is the gravitational center. The focus is completely on the present trends, extensive analysis of time series, and historical case studies. Magazines and Newspapers consider the customer’s expressed needs as the critical key for sales and success.

Companies in the industry apply an approach that is very analytical and sees surveys, customer specifications, and focus groups as main tools to detect the trends of the market and satisfy them with the highest standards.

Design-Driven: Metamorfosi, the Human Light

Design-Driven Innovation compared to the others

“A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs  ― BusinessWeek, May 25^th 1998

This sentence represents the essence of Design-Driven Innovation and its huge advantage on the other two types in the generation of new meanings, and Metamorfosi, the “human light” is a perfect example of it.

Metamorfosi

Metamorfosi, the “human light”, created a completely new meaning: a light that does not illuminate, but answer some human biological, psychological, and cultural needs.

They applied a process that started from the customers’ experience and through ethnography they proposed this new concept of light.

For those of you who do not know what Ethnography is, it is the “description and study of human culture” (Light Minds, 2005), and is a fundamental tool in this type of innovation because it helps understand the aspirations, values, desires and behaviors of existing or potential customers in their normal environment.

Ethnography

In this way the company was able to predict data and show people something they desired even before their awareness. Predicting the future is the most powerful source of competitive advantage. This is the very tremendous advantage of the Design-Driven approach and the secret of Metamorfosi’s success.

-Michele Bellini-

Note: This post was specifically developed for a college class and its purposes are only academic.