Innovation generally refers to changing or creating more effective processes, products and ideas, and can increase the likelihood of a business succeeding. Businesses that innovate create more efficient work processes and have better productivity and performance.
The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that "breaks into" the market or society.
Innovation generally refers to changing or creating more effective processes, products and ideas, and can increase the likelihood of a business succeeding. Businesses that innovate create more efficient work processes and have better productivity and performance.
Additionally, a breakthrough product often combines the functionality of several different products all into one. This is how I would categorize many of Apple’s products during the Steve Jobs era – especially the iPhone. When the iPhone came out its simplicity, beauty, functionality and ease of use put every other phone on the market to shame.
Sustaining ideas have to do with improving the current product by developing generations 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on until the product reaches the end of it’s life cycle.
Normally large companies are very good at creating sustaining innovations because their resources, business processes and cultures are setup in a way to enable sustaining efforts. Iphone is a very good example.
Typical sustaining efforts include the following:
Feature fixes/additions – most next generation products will come with a handful of fixes and/or new features that address previous gripes with the first generation products.
Cost reductions - as sales volumes grow for a product, the cost of purchasing raw materials for that product decline in addition to design enhancements that simplify the product or enable it to use less expensive materials.
Product line expansions