Innovation Tactics

Profit Model

• Ad-Supported: Provide content or services for free to one party while selling listneners, viewers, or "eyeballs" another party.
• Auction: Allow a merket-and its users-to set the price for goods and services.
• Bundled Pricing: Sell in a single transaction two or more items that could be sold as standalong offerings.
• Cost Leadership: Keep variable costs low and sell high volumes at low prices.
• Disaggregated Pricing: Allow customers to buy exactly-and only-what they want.
• Financing: Capture revenue not from the direct sale of a product but from structured payment plans and after-sale interest.
• Flexible Pricing: Vary prices for an offering based on demand.
• Float: Receive payment prior to building the offering; earn interest on that money prior to delivering the goods.
• Forced Scarcity: Limit the supply of offerings available, by quantity, time frame, or access, to drive up demand and/or prices.
• Freemium: Offer basic services for free while charging a premium for advanced or special features.
• Installed Base: Offer a "core" product for slime margins (or even a loss) to drive demand and loyalty; then realize profit on additional products and services.
• Licensing: Grant permission to a group or individual to use your offering in a defined way for a specified payment.
• Membership: Charge a time-based payment to allow access to locations, offerings, or services that non-members don't have.
• Metered Use: Allow customeres to pay only for what they use.
• Microtransactions: Sell many items for as little as a dollar-or even only one cent- to drive impulse purchases.
• Premium: Price at a higher margin than competitors, usually for a superior product, offering, experience, service, or brand.
• Risk Sharing: Waive standrad fees or costs if certain metrics aren't achieved, but receive outsize gains when they are.
• Scaled Transactions: Maximize margins by pursuing high-volume, large-scale transactions when unit costs are relatively fixed.
• Subscriptiuon: Create predictable cash flows by charging customers upfront (a one time or recurring fee) to have access to the product or service orver time.
• Switchboard: Connect multiple sellers with multiple buyers. The more buyers and sellers who join, the more valuable the switchboard becomes.
• User-Defined: Invite customers to set the prcie they wish to pay.

Network

• Alliances: Share risks and revenues to jointly improve individual competitive advantage.
• Collaboration: Partner with others for mutual benefit.
• Complementary partnering: Leverage assets by sharing them with companies that serve similar markets but offer different products and services.
• Consolidation: Acquire multiple companies in the same market or complementary markets.
• Coopetition: Join forces with someone who would normally be your competitior to achieve a common goal.
• Franchising: License business principles, processes, and brand to paying partners.
• Merger/Acquisition: Combine two or more entities to gain accesss to capabilities and assets.
• Open Innovation: Obtain access to processes or patents from other companies to leverage, extend, and build on expertise, and/or do the same with internal IP and processes.
• Secondary Markets: Connect waste streams, by-products, or other alternative offerings with those who want them.
• Supply Chain Integration: Coordinate and integrate information and/or processes across a company or different parts of the value chain.

Structure

• Asset Standardization: Reduce operating costs and increase connectivity and modularity by standardizing your assets.
• Competency Center: Cluster resources, practices, and expertise into centers that support functions across the organization to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
• Corporate University: Provide job-specific or company-specific training for managers.
• Decentralized Management: Devolve decision-making governance closer to the people or business interfaces.
• Incentive Systems: Offer rewards (financial or non-financial) to provide motivatino for a particular course of action.
• IT Integration: Integrate technology resources and applications.
• Knowledge Management: Share releavant information internally to reduce redundancy and improve job performance.
• Organizational Design: Make from follow function and align infrastructure with core qualities and business processes.
• Outsourcing: Assign to a vendor responsibility for developing or maintaining a ssystem.

Process

• Crowdsourcing: Outsource repetitive or challenging work to a large group of semi-organized individuals.
• Flexible Manufacturing: Use a production system that can rapidly react to changes and still operate efficiently.
• Flexible Manufacturing: Use a production system that can rapidly react to changes and still operate efficiently.
• Intellectual Property: Use a proprietary process to commercialize ideas in ways that others cannot copy.
• Lean Production: Reduce waste and cost in your manufacturing process and other operations.
• Localization: Adapt an offering, process, or experience to target a specific culture or region.
• Logistics Systems: Manage the flow of goods, information, and other resources between the point of origin and the point of use.
• On-Demand Production: Produce items after an order has been received to avoid carrying costs of inventory.
• Predictive Analytics: Model past performance data and predict future outcomes to design and price offerings accordingly.
• Process Automation: Apply tools and infrastructure to manage routine activities in order to free up employees for other tasks.
• Process Efficiency: Create or produce more while using less in terms of materials, energy consumption, or time.
• Process Standardization: Use common products, procedures, and policies to reduce complexity, costs, and errors.
• Strategic Design: Employ a purposeful approach that manifests itself consistently across offerings, brands, and experiences.
• User-Generated: Put your users to work in creating and curating the content that powers your offerings.

Product Performance

• Added Functionality: Add new capabilities to an existing offering.
• Conservation: Design your product so that end users can reduce their use of energy or materials.
• Customization: Enable altering to suit individual requirements or specifications.
• Ease of Use: Make your product simple, intuitive, and comfortable to use.
• Engaging Functionality: Provide an unexpected or newsworthy feature that elevates the customer interaction from the ordinary.
• Environmental Sensitivity: Create offerings that do no harm—or relatively less harm—to the environment.
• Feature Aggregation: Combine a number of existing features from disparate sources into a single offering.
• Focus: Design a product or service for a particular audience.
• Performance Simplification: Omit superfluous details, features, and interactions to reduce complexity.
• Safety: Increase the customer’s level of confidence and security.
• Styling: Impart a noteworthy style, fashion, or image to create a product that customers covet.
• Superior Product: Develop an offering of exceptional design, quality, and/or experience.

Product System

• Complements: Sell additional related or peripheral products or services to a customer.
• Extensions/Plug-ins: Allow additions from internal or third-party resources that add functionality.
• Integrated Offering: Combine otherwise discrete components into a complete experience.
• Modular Systems: Provide a set of individual components that can be used independently, but gain utility when combined.
• Product Bundling: Put together several products for sale as one combined offering.
• Product/Service Platforms: Develop systems that connect with other partner products and services to create a holistic offering.

Service

• Added Value: Include an additional service or function as part of the base price.
• Concierge: Provide premium service by taking on tasks for which customers don’t have time.
• Guarantee: Remove customer risk of lost money or time from product failure or purchase error.
• Lease or Loan: Let customers pay over time to lower their upfront costs.
• Loyalty Programs: Provide benefits and/or discounts to frequent and high-value customers.
• Personalized Service: Use the customer’s own information to provide perfectly calibrated service.
• Self-Service: Provide users with control over activities that would otherwise require an intermediary to complete.
• Superior Service: Provide service(s) of higher quality, efficacy, or which offer(s) a better experience than any competitor.
• Supplementary Service: Offer ancillary services that fit with your offering.
• Total Experience Management: Provide thoughtful, holistic management of the consumer experience across an offering’s lifecycle.
• Try Before You Buy: Let customers test and experience an offering before investing in it.
• User Communities/Support Systems: Provide a communal resource for product and service support, use, and extension.

Channel

• Context-Specific: Offer timely access to offerings that are appropriate for a specific location, occasion, or situation.
• Cross-Selling: Offer appealing additional products, services, or information that will enhance an experience in situations where customers are likely to want to buy them.
• Diversification: Add and expand into new or different channels.
• Experience Center: Create space that encourages your customers to interact with your offerings—but purchase them through a different (and often lower cost) channel.
• Flagship Store: Create a retail outlet to showcase quintessential brand and product attributes.
• Go Direct: Skip traditional retail channels and connect directly with customers.
• Indirect Distribution: Use others as resellers who take responsibility for delivering an offering to the final user.
• Multi-Level Marketing: Sell bulk or packaged goods to an affiliated but independent sales force that turns around and sells it for you.
• Non-Traditional Channels: Employ novel and relevant avenues to reach and service customers.
• On-Demand: Deliver goods in real-time whenever or wherever they are desired.
• Pop-Up Presence: Create a noteworthy but temporary environment to showcase and/or sell offerings.

Brand

• Brand Extension: Offer a new product or service under the umbrella of an existing brand.
• Brand Leverage: Allow others to use your brand name to lend them your credibility and extend your company’s reach.
• Certification: Develop a brand or mark that signifies and ensures certain desirable characteristics in third-party offerings.
• Co-Branding: Combine brands to mutually reinforce key attributes or enhance the credibility of an offering.
• Component Branding: Brand a discrete piece of the offering to make the whole appear more valuable.
• Private Label: Provide goods made by others packaged under your company’s brand.
• Transparency: Let customers see into your operations and participate with your brand and offerings.
• Values Alignment: Make your brand stand for a big idea or a set of values and express them consistently in all aspects of your company.

Customer Engagement

• Autonomy and Authority: Grant users the power to shape their own experience.
• Community and Belonging: Facilitate visceral connections to make people feel they are part of a group or movement.
• Curation: Create a distinct point of view to build a strong identity for yourself and give your followers exactly what they want.
• Experience Automation: Remove the burden of repetitive tasks from users to simplify their lives and make new experiences seem magical.
• Experience Enabling: Extend the realm of what’s possible to offer a previously improbable experience.
• Experience Simplification: Reduce complexity and focus on delivering specific experiences exceptionally well.
• Mastery: Help customers to obtain great skill or deep knowledge of some activity or subject.
• Personalization: Alter a standard offering to allow the projection of the customer’s identity.
• Status and Recognition: Offer cues that confer meaning, allowing users—and those who interact with them—to develop and nurture aspects of their identity.
• Whimsy and Personality: Humanize your offering with small flourishes of on-brand, on-message ways of seeming alive.

Reference

• Keeley, L., Walters, H., Pikkel, R., & Quinn, B. (2013). Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.