What Does Modern Innovation Mean?

“Why is this product worth bringing to the market?” was the standard question posed by our class in BADM 261 whenever we discussed the experience of introducing a new product. This is the question that comes to mind most often when someone thinks about innovation. To many, innovation is synonymous with inventing a brand-new product category or enhancing an existing product. Defined this way, innovation looks a lot like invention, making it seem nearly impossible for any business to succeed.

Over the summer, I read Ten Types of Innovation by Deloitte Digital. It identifies ten distinct sources of innovation, organized into three categories: Offering, Experience, and Configuration.

• Offering covers two familiar forms of innovation: Product Performance and Product System. These involve creating something new or superior to competitors and packaging it in novel ways.

• Configuration includes Profit Model, Structure, Network, and Process. This category focuses on improving internal business models and rethinking traditional ways of generating profit. For example, Uber and Airbnb transformed established industries by reshaping how companies make money.

• Experience includes Service, Channel, Brand, and Customer Engagement. This category is about how businesses interact with customers and shape perceptions. For example, Taco Bell and McDonald’s introduced digital kiosks, not changing the taco or Big Mac itself but fundamentally altering the customer experience.

  
  

I won’t dive too deeply into the ten types themselves (you can explore them here: https://www.deloittedigital.com/us/en/offerings/customer-led-marketing/customer-strategy-and-applied-design/applied-design-and-innovation/ten-types.html), but I’d like to share how I applied them and how they can make the world a better place.

It’s easy to look back at innovations like Uber or Netflix and think, “How hard could that have been to come up with? The idea seems so simple.” In truth, the challenge lies in generating original ideas in the first place. Learning about the Ten Types of Innovation changed the way I approach creativity. Thanks to this framework, the Task Force Tips Health team and I developed a new interactive demo system for our products. I realized that simply understanding the various forms of innovation can unlock a new level of creative potential.

When I first arrived at Task Force Tips as an engineering intern, I focused almost exclusively on improving our products. I believed these enhancements would meaningfully strengthen our health segment, so I shared them with my boss. While the ideas were solid, I quickly realized our real challenges were not with product performance. We already led the industry in top-tier firefighter health equipment. Instead, our obstacles were in configuration and experience.

After encouraging me to read Ten Types of Innovation, my boss helped me see what it truly means to be an impactful and productive employee. Like many engineering students, I had been fixated on technical improvements alone. But product performance is just one piece of the puzzle. Businesses also depend on innovation in structure, service, and customer engagement. Recognizing this broadened my perspective, and I believe more engineering students should learn this earlier in their careers.

In my view, T&M is doing an excellent job of challenging students’ preconceived notions about business and engineering, pushing them beyond a purely “technical skills first” mindset.