The Three Innovation Drivers

Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility

I find that product innovation usually occurs in the following three areas: the user experience (UX) and the product features, the business model, or the product’s architecture and technologies. Apple’s first iPhone is an example of a product whose innovation was focused on the user experience and new features such as mobile Internet; the new generation of LED televisions exemplifies technology-driven innovation; and Amazon’s cloud service is an example of business model innovation.

When creating a product with a great user experience, the biggest challenge is to ensure that it is desirable, that the product does a great job for its users and that the user will want to employ it. For business model focussed innovations, it’s developing a sustainable business model, and for technology-driven innovations, it’s dealing with feasibility – applying the new technologies successfully. Desirability, viability, and feasibility hence form three important innovation drivers, as the following diagram shows. The diagram is inspired by the design constraints discussed in Tim Brown’s book Change by Design.

For instance, if your product’s competitive advantage is intended to be the user experience then you should aim to understand what makes the product desirable, develop appropriate hypotheses, and employ focussed experiments, for instance, A/B tests to see which feature variant is more attractive to the users. The same holds true for viability and desirability.

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Applying the Innovation Drivers

When I start to work on a new product, I use the three drivers to understand where innovation occurs and how much uncertainty is present in the development effort. I usually apply the drivers by creating a Product Vision Board sketching the product’s target users and customers, the needs to be addressed, the key features, and the value the product should create together with the product owner and the development team. We then explore and mark the areas of uncertainty.

Here is how this can work in practice: I recently met with the team members of a new product development project of a major UK retailer. The team’s vision was to create new software in order to increase the revenue generated from creating custom solutions for the company’s customers. Together, we created the following product vision board using a piece of flip chart paper and adhesive notes (the details on the notes have been blurred to hide the details):

The two pink stripes indicate the areas of uncertainty and the product’s innovation drivers: UX/features and the business model, and desirability and viability. The former is related to creating a product that does a great job for the company’s sales staff and its customers. The latter refers to the ability to achieve the desired business goals including the revenue increase targeted. The exercise created a shared understanding about the challenges the team was facing, focussed the team’s work, and improved the communication with senior management.

The three innovation drivers help you understand where innovation occurs and where uncertainty is present. This enables you to ask the right questions, formulate appropriate hypotheses, and carry out helpful, focussed experiments.