The Ways to New

Part TwoDisruptive Paths to Innovation

Marketing can and must drive innovation.

To support marketing departments in their search for new ideas, we offer a framework for thinking. This comes as a series of different ways of innovating called “The Fifteen Innovation Paths.” And this is what will be discussed in that second part.

Academic business writers have established many different forms of classification. Larry Keeley, for one, has identified Ten Types of Innovation (Wiley 2013) based on network, structure, process, performance, system, service, channel, brand, customer, and profit. In Dealing with Darwin (Portfolio 2008), Geoffrey A. Moore comes up with product leadership innovation, consumer intimacy innovation, operational excellence innovation, and category renewal innovation. The New York Academy of Science prefers to group modes of innovation into two broad categories: early linear model and convergence-sensitive model.

As far as I am concerned, not one of these different classifications is more relevant than any other. Not even ours. Each is the product of its author's own thinking. Each has a specific purpose. Our mode of classification is about collecting case studies into stimulating clusters, in order to come up with a range of thought-provoking questions.

Most business analysts see disruption as a term to explain or describe what is happening now in some industries or companies. Their approach is analytical. But to us, Disruption is not a theory: it is a method. ...