Types of Innovation Models

Where do you want your career to go?

Start ups are made out to be a lot more complicated than they actually are. At its core, they are about finding a good product — market fit and building a business that customers actually want. There are three ways of doing this:

1. First building a product, launching it and then responding to how the market responds to it. This is the more traditional way of doing business where a lot of time and money is spent in the research and development and then placing your work of carefully curated genius into the market. The downside to this is that users come into the process only at the end to validate the idea. Once everything is almost ‘complete’. So what happens if you end up building a product that nobody cares about? The positive side to this is that you have incrementally taken your time and effort to develop a quality product with enough research behind it to make a calculated assumption that this idea will work.
2. The second approach is responding to the market needs and building a product accordingly. So if your consumers want faster cars, you build faster cars. This is a guaranteed roadmap for a stable income and filling a need. Which is why fundamental industries like real estate, oil, electricity, steel, water will always be in demand and provide a return in investment. For example, Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in India. What is his main business? Petrochemicals, oil and gas, telecom.
3. The third approach is the lean start up model which is essential if you are creating something new and unique to the market. You build a MVP and put it out there as quickly as possible to validate your idea. A trusted feedback loop where based on the response you get from your users, you iterate your idea till you have a product that you know will have paying customers. For example, Slack’s ability to pivot from an online game to a messaging software made it successful.

There is no linear, one size fits all roadmap to the top of the mountain. Every type of innovation model and business has its success and failure story. Where you choose to spend your time and energy varies from personality type to personal goals. The essential influencing factor is to get to where you want to go with clarity and purpose.