Types of innovation

Your business can take a number of different approaches to innovation. Usually, this will depend on how much time and money you have available and what your business strategy is. These approaches can be part of a continuous cycle or employed on a more ad-hoc basis, depending on your needs.

Incremental innovation

Incremental innovation focuses on making modest improvements to existing processes, products or services.

This could be anything from tightening up an existing workflow by automating some of the process, to improving your website in order to make self-service easier, thus reducing the number of customers coming to you through more costly and time-consuming channels.

Read more about improving business processes.

Radical innovation

Radical innovation involves creating a completely new process or product in response to a market need or opportunity.

Radical innovations tend to come about as a result of careful research and development into a specific issue or problem, and frequently make use of new technology to solve them. These kinds of innovations are often seen as 'breakthrough' innovations, some of which can change the entire way an organisation operates and, on occasion, can result in a new product or service that impacts an entire market sector.

The Australian Institute for Commercialisation is a Queensland-based organisation who can work with your business and help you transform your ideas or innovations into practical outcomes.

Combining radical and incremental innovation

Sometimes the best approach can be to combine radical and incremental innovation. An example of this would be to develop a totally new process to produce and manage an existing product or service.

This could involve anything from outsourcing part of your manufacturing process, which was previously done in-house, to moving your IT system onto a more flexible platform, such as cloud computing, to enable work-from-home arrangements or to help employees respond more effectively while on the move.

See how high-speed broadband can impact your business or read case studies for other examples of how different businesses use innovation to their advantage.

Integrating design into your business

Another way to make the most of innovation is to become a design-led business and to integrate design into your daily operations. Design can help you unlock valuable opportunities, either by generating new ideas or by improving a product or service to better suit your customers' needs.

Design can also help strengthen and streamline your business processes, and help you understand any weakness that may exist within your supply chain.

Related links

• Learn how to protect your idea.
• Read innovation case studies and learn how other businesses have successfully used design to compete.
• Learn more about innovation grants and support.