Types and Aspects of Innovation - Term Paper Example

The paper "Types and Aspects of Innovation" is a great example of a term paper on business.

Product Innovation
Product innovation means incorporating new and unique features to the product. Innovation is necessarily something that is valued by the consumers, otherwise, a change can also turn out to be a disaster. An example of product innovation is the transparency of Apple iPhone 5 as advertised in ads is innovation, since no transparent mobile phone to date is known.

Process Innovation

Process innovation means modifying the process to improve it in a unique way. For example, lean manufacturing is a manufacturing concept of the value chain that qualifies as innovation, since it is nontraditional and results in many benefits including lesser waste, lesser cost, improved efficiency and maximize the profitability of the business.

Position Innovation

            Position innovation means re-positioning an established process or product’s perception in a particular way. The main purpose of position innovation is to change the way the process or product is used and symbolically perceived. For example, “Levi-Strauss jeans are a well-established global product line, originally developed as manual workers’ clothing materials, but then re-branded as a fashion item” (humanitarianinnovation.org, n.d.).

Paradigm Innovation

            Paradigm innovation defines an organization’s or sector’s dominant paradigms. Paradigm innovation is linked to the mental models that define a business’s or organization’s significance. A good example of paradigm innovation is the introduction of community-based feeding therapy.

Incremental Innovation

Incremental innovation, as the name implies, employs existing technologies to start with, and makes sustained improvements to make them better and more useful. Apple iPod is a good example of incremental innovation. At the start, the iPod was only available in white color and allowed the users to play mp3 music and store it. Incremental improvements made over the years have made the Apple iPods available to the users in different colors, and now it enables the users to store videos as well as family photographs (Gilliard, 2012).

Platform Innovation

            Platform innovation means establishing a platform that facilitates the practical application of essential innovations. Examples of platform innovation include a cell phone and computers.

For example, “Apple and Amazon have created disruptive platform innovations that change the game for consumers” (Nussbaum, 2009).

Discontinuous Innovation

            Discontinuous innovation is a kind of innovation that calls for a significant modification of behavior to be adopted. An example of discontinuous innovation is changing in the music-playing devices with the addition of more useful features, like the change from LP record to cassette tapes to CD players to the MP3 players.

Component Innovation

            Component innovation is often an outcome of disruptive innovation that instead of making small changes to the existing system, changes the whole system which in turn causes all of the system components to change as well. For example, the disruptive innovation of the PC revolution caused several component innovations to be made including the networking, printer, and office scanner, etc.

Timing/Lifecycle

Every innovation has a lifecycle-based on four fundamental stages that flow in this pattern; ideation, project selection, product development, and product commercialization. These stages explain the lifecycle of innovation from start to finish.