by Bozho | Nov 24, 2018 | Aggregated, innovation, Opinions
We are often talking about “innovation” and “digital innovation” (or “technical innovation”) in particular, when it comes to tech startups. It has, unfortunately, become a cliche, and now “innovation” is devoid of meaning. I’ve been trying to put some meaningful analysis of the “innovation landscape” and to classify what is being called “innovation”. And the broad classification I got to is “technical innovation” vs “process innovation”. In the majority of cases, tech startups are actually process innovations. They get existing technology and try to optimize some real world process with it. These processes include “communicating with friends online”, “getting in touch with business contacts online”, “getting a taxi online”, “getting a date online”, “ordering food online”, “uploading photos online”, and so on. There is no inherent technical innovation in any of these – they either introduce new (and better) processes, or they optimize existing ones. And don’t get me wrong – these are all very useful things. In fact, this is what “digital transformation” means – doing things electronically that were previously done in an analogue way, or doing things that were previously not possible in the analogue world. And the better you imagine or reimagine the process, the more effective your company will be. In many cases these digital transformation tools have to deal with real-world complexities – legislation, entrenched behaviour, edge cases. E.g. you can easily write food delivery software. You get the order, you notify the store, you optimize the delivery people’s routes to collect and deliver as much food as possible, and you’re good to go. And then you “hit” the real world, where there...
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