3 tests for breakthrough innovation

Innovation Rules or types of tests for disruption fall into 3 types:

Type I. Understand and appeal to human nature.

Technologists - like product managers - love technology. But successful technology starts with people. Develop a curiosity for how people - non-technologists - really work. People typically make decisions based on basic needs, even if they have a complicated rationale. Be wary of your own enthusiasm for technology and be skeptical of complicated reasons for the use of your technology.

1. Let technology serve people

2. Automate the valuable and unexpected

3. Seek radical disruption, not just sustaining innovation

Type II. Find the fundamental pattern that delivers value.

Products fit into a system of people, needs, rewards, and other technology in a setting: time, place, and culture. Successful products add to or create a pattern that people value. Fight the tendency to believe that every feature is a part of this pattern. In fact, most features are a distraction rather than an improvement.

4. Find the fundamental pattern through all the noise

5. Distill to the essence; assume the non-essential can be removed

6. Go beyond product: consider channel, model, service, and process

Type III. Use the right analogy from the past.

Draw on past innovations to avoid reinventing rules of technology adoption. Fortunately, history repeats itself, because patterns that served people well in the past are also likely to serve them well in the future. The problem is that we believe that new technology is so different and so much better than old technology, that we fail to recognize the same part in a different form.

7. Apply the right past analogy

8. Take advantage of network effects

9. Make the right platform bets

10. Use the same technology for a new application

11. Use new technology for the same application

12. Examine scope: develop into adjacency

The next entries explore these Innovation Rules in more detail.