Everyone’s chasing the next big thing. A new app. A better mousetrap. A new AI something-a-jig. 

But novelty alone isn’t the answer.

Innovation is not new.

For a product-leading company, it’s not a new product—it’s a better way of delivering value that customers care about. 

For a customer-intimate company, it’s not a new feature—it’s a deeper relationship that creates opportunity. 

For an operationally excellent company, it’s not a new process—it’s a better outcome at scale.

The pressure to innovate never stops.

Customers expect it. Competitors chase it. Change demands it.

But not all that is new moves the needle.

Innovation, then, follows a simple formula:

Innovation = Novelty x Value x Impact

Without Novelty, innovation is ho-hum. Lacking Value, you have a gimmick. Deduct Impact, and you have a missed opportunity.

Novelty is a new product, feature, or process. Value is what customers care about: the resolution to their problem, a job to be done. Impact changes a behavior at scale. The product gives its end user a better version of themselves.

Value comes from making it—the job to be done—cheaper, faster, easier, or smarter.

Impact is the differential. The difference between the old way and the new way. The difference between the old me, and the new version of me.

Six truths of innovation.

Look at any innovation—chopping and bagging a lettuce (Fresh Express), putting a million songs in your pocket (Spotify), turning taxis into apps (Uber), from renting to streaming (Netflix), going to the store to pressing “Buy now” (Amazon).

You see patterns.

Those patterns—those truths—can guide your innovation journey, whether you are rethinking a product, reinventing a process, or redesigning a service. They are:

#1. Innovation is a remix.

#2. Innovation lives in the seams.

#3. Innovation loops and learns.

#4. Innovation dies without execution.

#5. Innovation requires unlearning.

#6. Innovation lives in a system.

#1. Innovation is a remix.

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007. He told a story of three technologies fused together: A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. Three devices, fused together.

Jobs’ genius was to remix. The Mac took from his college fascination with calligraphy. Pixar blended storytelling and computer graphics to reinvent animation. NeXT and later the iMac reimagined software and hardware design—merging beauty and function.

Innovation doesn’t come from nowhere.

It’s the recombination of existing ideas, tech, or models—reframed in a new context. Great innovators borrow, blend, and bend what already exists to unlock new value.

Think DJ, not diva.

#2. Innovation lives in the seams.

Write → Save → Attach → Email → Edit → Repeat.

Throw in a couple of blue screens, and you have collaboration circa 2010. Teamwork by inbox. Collaboration by version control. 

Then Google changed the game. They bought Writely, an online text editor. And Docverse, which lets people co-edit traditional office files.

The seam: collaboration. The result: a living document.

Write → Edit → [Collaborate]

One doc. One team. One shared space.

Innovation crosses boundaries—product, process, service, business model, experience.

Real innovation rarely stays in its lane. And when it hops categories, it changes the game.

If it doesn’t challenge a boundary, it’s just an upgrade.

#3. Innovation loops and learns.

Humans like straight lines and good stories.

Here’s one consultants tell: NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen to write in space, while the Russians used a pencil.

Codswallop.

Pencils break. Tips float. Graphite dust is flammable and conductive—not ideal in a pressurized capsule filled with electronics and oxygen.

The real story: Paul Fisher, a private inventor, spent his own money to develop the Fisher Space Pen, filled with a pressurized ink cartridge that could write upside down, underwater, and in zero gravity. 

NASA tested it, then bought it. So did the Russians. 

Both agencies still use it today.

Successful innovation moves through stages: 

Idea → Concept → Prototype → Development → Production → Adoption.

Each stage is a gate. And at every gate, it can fail—and teach you something.

Innovation isn’t smooth. It’s not a straight line. It’s a loop—of learning, adjusting, and adapting. The best innovators constantly circle back. They iterate. They test again.

And get smarter with every pass.

4. Innovation dies without execution.

Ideas are ten a penny. They’re important, just not that important.

Execution matters. Idea to sketch. PowerPoint to prototype. Prototype to production. Production to payoff.

Pinocchio wasn’t real because he was carved from wood.

He became real through struggle: every setback taught him something. That’s the path to execution. The devil is in the details.

James Dyson had an idea after his vacuum clogged. He worked the problem. 5,127 prototypes and five years later, he launched a product that changed the industry.

Ideas are cheap—especially now, with AI. What is not? The persistence that brings an idea to life. Shipping is hard. Testing, building, scaling, and surviving resistance—is the sweaty part.

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It’s not the spark. It’s the follow-through.

5. Innovation requires unlearning.

Everything is obvious once you know the answer.

But if pre-cut, bagged lettuce is so obvious, why didn’t anyone do it sooner?

Why did it take Amazon so long to invent 1-click ordering?

Technically, they could have launched it in 1996. They had user accounts. They stored credit card and shipping info. They ran their own checkout pipeline. 

So why wait three years?

Because the dominant mental model was retail brain—copying the physical store into a digital world. Shopping carts, multi-step checkouts, and a final confirmation. 

The logic of bricks and mortar, ported to pixels.

Three years isn’t a long time for the obvious to emerge. Try 112 years.

Martin Eberhard drove his first roadster in 2006, three years after founding Tesla. That’s a blink compared to the Electrobat, the first commercially viable working electric car, in 1894

Why did it take so long?

Because for 100 years, we believed gasoline was the future. That range, speed, and power only came from combustion. Infrastructure followed belief. And belief is hard to unlearn.

The biggest barrier to innovation isn’t imagination—it’s expertise.

The logic that made you successful is blocking what’s next. To invent, you must first unlearn.

You have to let go of what you know to see what could be.

6. Innovation lives in a system.

No idea wins in a vacuum.

In The Wide Lens, Ron Adner shows why some of the best innovations fall flat. Not for lack of imagination—but because the system wasn’t ready.

Adner tells the story of Philips’ CD-i—a 1990s multimedia platform that could play music, video, games, and more. A product ahead of its time.

But it lacked content. Retailers didn’t know how to sell it. Consumers didn’t know what it was for. It flopped. Not because of the product, but because of the system.

When Apple launched the iPod, it launched into an ecosystem. Music rights, handled by iTunes. USB 2.0 for faster syncing. An army of early adopters using Napster, Kazaa, and LimeWire.

The timing was right, the partners were ready, and the customers were primed.

Product-market fit means you are solving a problem people care about. Ecosystem fit means the world is ready for your answer.

Customers, partners, timing, and readiness all matter. Ecosystem fit is as critical as product fit.

A brilliant idea at the wrong time is still a failure.

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