Innovation has become an overused term. What does true technical innovation look like, and how does a tech startup set itself up for success (even without it)?
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When it comes to tech startups, we often talk about innovation — “digital innovation” (or “technical innovation”) in particular. It has, unfortunately, become a cliche, and now “innovation” is devoid of meaning. I’ve been trying to do some meaningful analysis of the “innovation landscape,” and to classify what is being called “innovation.”
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 a real-world process with it. Some examples of these processes would include “communicating with friends online,” “getting in touch with business contacts online,” “getting a taxi online,” “getting a date online,” “ordering food online,” “sharing 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.
Don’t get me wrong — these are all very useful innovations. In fact, this is what “digital transformation” is supposed to mean — doing things electronically that were previously done in an analog way, or doing things that were previously not possible in the analog world. And the better you imagine or reimagine the process, the more effective your company will be.
In many cases, digital transformation tools must confront real-world complexities — legislation, entrenched behavior, and edge cases. For example, 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 are traffic jams, temporarily closed streets, restricted parking, unreponsive restaurants, unresponsive customers, keeping the online menu and what’s in stock in sync, worsened weather conditions, messed up orders, part-time job regulations that differ by country, and so on.
