Successful Entrepreneurs Drive Innovation and Productivity Through Sustainable Automation

The Four Major Types Of Innovations

Incremental Innovation - in simple terms is work in progress. Innovating continuously to get to the end goal, like Tesla for an example. When Tesla introduced the first electric car to the market, the car generally provided about 200 miles range distance and now have innovated the battery technology to provide over 500 miles. The next possible innovation could be targeting the 1000 miles battery. The constant innovation by Tesla has reduced the number of individual components and the time it takes to build the components. Therefore, innovation is a reoccurring continuous process, because once the milestone has been reached, does not mean innovation should stop (Ali, 1994).

Disruptive innovation - takes what you already have and reduces the overheads and fixed costs, leaving behind enormous amounts of profit at a minimal cost (Schmidt, 2008). If we can go back around 15-20 years, and search for companies that provided mobile network services. We would find about 4 major players in the industry, Orange, T-Mobile, Three and O2. To become one of the players, you would need to start from ground up, to build the infrastructure. Like, the software requirements, the installation of aerials into every urban area and throughout the whole country to ensure signal strengths. But then, Richard Branson came along, realized an opportunity existed and started up a mobile phone company, by tapping into, each one of the networks surplus capacity. There is no need to create an infrastructure when four companies in that sector already existed with very heavy investments in fixed assets. Branson was able to offer a service at a fraction of the cost, without the overheads of building and maintaining a physical network. By owning the right to license bandwidth and airtime from one or more of the existing networks. Airtime can be switched from one carrier to another to minimize cost. The service was and still is invisible to the consumers who can make calls without noticing who the carrier is providing service for the call. This is a great example of disruptive technology and innovation without all the huge investments and the big overheads (Samit, 2015). This can read further in the book by the author Jay Samit and the book titled Disrupt Yourself.