Breakthrough Innovation – What Are They, and How Do You Create One?

Breakthrough innovation is a term that refers to innovations that have a dramatic impact, changing the dynamics of a given industry or market. This type of innovation is an umbrella term that includes various types of innovations that lead to a significant shift or transformation in the market. In this blog post, the focus is on what breakthrough innovation is, why it is important, and how to create one. The post starts by stating that the definitions of breakthrough innovation are quite diverse. However, what all definitions have in common is that breakthrough innovation changes the dynamics of a given industry or market. Most of the time, breakthrough innovation isn't just a single innovation, but usually, it's based on a bigger radical or disruptive innovation combined with smaller, incremental and sustaining innovations to reshape entire markets and industries. Then the post explains why breakthrough innovation matters. In the current age of innovation, there are more emergent technology-based innovation platforms than ever before, and the ground is ripe for breakthrough innovation to reshape most industries. To understand breakthrough innovation, it's essential to understand that innovations that achieve a dramatic impact are the combination of many innovations to tackle a specific challenge or opportunity. The reason for this is that it often isn't possible to solve a truly meaningful problem without combining a number of novel ideas or approaches. Furthermore, the post gives a few examples of breakthrough innovation such as Airbnb, reusable rockets, and Tesla. Airbnb started off in the very low-end of the travel and hospitality market by just renting out air mattresses for the night and acquired customers using clever marketing mechanisms. Reusable rockets are a series of new technologies and innovations that result in dramatic decrease costs of space launches. Tesla's electric vehicles have surpassed the unit sales of their rivals in the segments they're competing in, which has forced the rest of the automotive industry to follow. Finally, the post offers a three-step approach on how to create breakthrough innovations, which involves identifying the right problem or opportunity, addressing that opportunity with a key innovation, and scaling the innovation to reach breakthrough impact. The post concludes by stating that creating a breakthrough innovation isn't straightforward or easy to implement but requires a focus on building and scaling the innovation.