There are three ascending tiers of innovation that you can embrace in your businesses to achieve its goals:

1. Incremental Innovation - This consists of small, yet meaningful improvements in your products, services, and other ways in which you do business.  These tend to be the "new and improved" innovations we are all bombarded with every day: new flavors, shifts to better or all-natural ingredients, packaging improvements, faster/slower functioning, just-in-time supply chain enhancements, bigger/smaller sizing, cost reductions, heavier/lighter weight.  We see them every day and they help extend product, service, and business life cycles and improve profitablity.  They can be easily visualized and quickly communicated and give you something new with which to grab consumer attention in an increasingly noisy marketplace.

2. Breakthrough Innovation - This is a meaningful change in the way you do business that gives consumers something demonstrably new (beyond "new and improved").  Breakthrough innovation produces a substantial competitive edge for a while, although the length of time anyone can maintain such an advantage is growing increasingly shorter.

3. Transformational Innovation - This is usually (but not always) the introduction of a technology that creates a new industry and transforms the way we live and work.  This kind of innovation often eliminates existing industries or, at a minimum, totally transforms them.  For this reason, transformational innovations tend to be championed by those who aren't wedded to an existing infrastructure.  Transformational innovation is exceedingly rare.  Think about it: how many truly new-to-the-world ideas happen in a year?  In a lifetime? Not many! 

In some ways, transformational innovation is easier to pursue because the change required to achieve it usually doesn't rely on an existing entity that is committed to the old way of doing things.  That's why we often find transformational innovation coming from start-up companies.  But no company can survive by pursuing only transformational innovation.

There are benefits and problems associated with focusing your efforts on any type of innovation.  Incremental innovation is the oil that keeps the engine running, but it cannot be your only focus.  You can only grow your business so much by adding aloe as an ingredient or offering a different color.  Breakthrough innovation is expensive, messy and uncomfortable but it is becoming increasingly necessary to pursue if you want to remain relevent.  Gambling on transformational innovation alone is too risky. 

 

Digitalization has a proven impact on reducing unemployment, improving quality of life, and boosting citizens’ access to public services. Finally, digitization allows governments to operate with greater transparency and efficiency.

 

Here are two examples of proven benefits of digitalization.

1.0    Esri, a leader in geographic information systems, reduced development time for web projects by 20-50% by moving to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, Adobe’s cloud-native CMS. 

2.0    Silicon Labs, which makes silicon devices and software, is responding faster to changing market demands since adopting Adobe’s cloud-native platform — and their developers can spend more time designing new features since they don’t have to manage an on-premise environment.

 

Look at tools that give sales and marketing more visibility into each other’s activities — anything that promotes better collaboration between these two teams will yield benefits far into the future. For example, Extreme Networks, a global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions, used Marketo Engage to build stronger alignment between marketing and sales and improve the quality of leads passed to the sales team. After implementing Marketo across the organization, Extreme Networks increased their outbound email volume by 1,400% in just a year, with a 25% increase in deliverability.

 

If you’re moving marketing events to a virtual format, you’ll benefit from an event planning tool that uses real-time updates based on a customer’s behavior and opportunity status. And if you’re thinking about shifting your go-to-market strategy, perhaps to expand online sales or add a direct-to-consumer online sales channel, you’ll want a commerce platform that is inclusive enough to serve both business customers and consumers.

Whatever your situation, as you’re buying or building tools to solve an urgent problem, think carefully about the long-term value each solution could provide once the crisis is over. Going forward, make resilience a part of your business strategy that you assess on a regular basis, rather than waiting until another crisis hits to think about it again.