The Four Types of Innovation - And Why You Need the New One

A lot of people, even those trained in the field, think that innovation is just one set of practices.  That's not the case.  How you do innovation depends on the kind of challenge you face.  And as a result, over the last 70 years, three very different methodologies have been widely adopted.  Today a fourth approach, Ecosystem Innovation, is emerging in response to the need to tackle complex and fast moving challenges in business and the world around us. 

While ecosystem innovation draws on some ideas from prior approaches to innovation, it is not simply a few new techniques added onto existing practice.  Instead, it is an end to end methodology driven by big picture thinking, which enables innovators to address messier and more complex challenges.   

To really understand where ecosystem innovation fits, and why it's so important to master this approach, it will help to understand which problems traditional innovation practices addressed. In this CORE CONCEPT video, I take a step back and talk about each of the three traditional methodologies. With that foundation, I show why the new fourth approach is so needed for today's challenges.