Innovation is one of the top CEO concerns world wide to accelerate growth and attract top talent. Innovation is the introduction of new ideas, goods, services, and practices. An essential element for innovation is its application in a commercially successfully way. Innovation has changed human history. Consider the development of steam engines, motor vehicles, electricity — all breakthrough and transformation forms of disruptive, changing our landscape forever.

There are two forms of innovation:

1.) Evolutionary Innovation which extends a product or service life cycle, eg: improve known product or service offerings. For example, Bell Canada’s acquisitions of professional service companies to diversity its portfolio against declining long-distant features. Other recent Canadian examples include Rogers acquisition of Fido which further extended their market footprint providing wireless solutions to different market segments.

The risk to CEO’s all striving for innovation and increased growth is many have lost sight of developing disruptive innovation competencies which encourage increased risk taking, emergent thinking like a venture capital firm — -continually scanning the global landscape to identity new ideas and new possibilities.

2.) Disruptive Innovation, originally framed by Clayton Christensen, Harvard Professor, and founder of Innosight . Disruptive innovation is where products or services introduce entirely new concepts or create entirely new markets eg: the new business model of delivering personal computers using an Internet channel, and Google’s revolutionary internet search and advertising models. Both Dell and Google took advantage of their disruptive capabilities through creating new billion dollar industries catching many market leaders unprepared.

More information on disruptive innovation is highlighted in a recent KM World article

Helix Commerce International Inc. specializes in helping companies accelerate their innovation capabilities. Partnering with global leaders like Innosight, and leading thought leaders from Cognitive Edge, we have developed unique approaches to help senior executives to increase their innovation capacity.