Accelerate Business Growth:
Igniting the Power of Iterative Incremental Innovation
Incremental innovation approaches impactful business development through iterating modest improvements to existing products, processes, or services. Unlike disruptive innovation, which introduces new and often radical changes, incremental innovation focuses on enhancing and optimizing what already exists.
This approach allows companies to refine their offerings, address pain points, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market. Incremental innovation involves a series of iterative steps, with each improvement building on the last on to achieve gradual progress. While the improvements may seem small individually, they compound into significant gains in efficiency, profitability, and overall customer satisfaction over time. By constantly seeking to make small but meaningful improvements, companies can stay agile and relevant in today’s dynamic business environment.
Illustrative Example:
ABC, Inc. determines that their new ERP system facilitates their accounting and operations functions well but lacks effective financial reporting capabilities. In order to achieve accurate reporting, their finance team resorted to creating reports in excel and manually updating them each week. This has resulted in the finance team expending considerable hours on data preparation instead of the impactful analysis that drives business decisions. ABC now faces the daunting decision of repeating the arduous and costly process of implementing a different ERP system or continue manually updating their routine reports.
Through incremental innovation, Muntis Financial Services develops a process for creating reports customized to ABC’s business model, automating the data import/preparation/presentation, and linking the report to ABC’s database for instant updating. As each report is built, resources such as back-end code and portions of the data models can be reused to increase the speed of future report development. Once all of the reports are created and linked together, ABC’s has replaced their ERP’s reporting functionality with their own customized system and achieved architectural innovation.
The true value of incremental innovation lies in the iterative development process, which harnesses the power of small, continuous improvements to deliver significant benefits.
Smaller iterations minimize investment at risk and are more easily reversible.
With check-ins between each iteration, small changes can be made to accommodate increasingly refined business needs.
New software/hardware is rarely required as we build upon existing processes.
With greater directional control, the tailored solution optimally fulfills long-term business needs.
As small developments are implemented in each iteration, little to no disruption to operations should be experienced.
Smaller changes to daily tasks are easily assimilated and familiarized.
Incorporating feedback in each iteration builds confidence in the process.
Value is received early and often with short, prioritized development iterations.
“Compound Interest is the Eigth Wonder of the World”
The iterative nature of incremental innovation is akin to the power of compound interest. As each interval of interest compounds upon the cumulative interest before it, each iteration of incremental innovation builds upon the collective advancements of previous iterations.
By automating one business process, the code, data model, and knowledge base can be decoupled and replicated to streamline the automation of future reports with greater efficiency. As relationships form between each modeled report and the tools developed, synergies are created, enabling deeper insights and effortless data manipulation. This interconnectivity amplifies the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the innovation process, unlocking a reservoir of untapped potential for your organization.