Innovation, Technology, Leadership

Here’s What Combinatorial Innovation Means.

How combinatorial innovation can augment current business capabilities for new insights in the digital world

Introduction

In this article, I introduce the concept of combinatorial innovation with examples, the reasons for the growing focus on digitally transforming business organizations, and the primary business use cases.

Combinatorial innovation is rapidly developing and receiving attention in many transforming business organizations and startup companies. Business executives and entrepreneurs embrace this concept.

Some advocates even call this the age of “combinatorial innovation” and propose it to address societal challenges.

Let’s define it.

What is combinatorial innovation?

Combinatorial innovation is an industry term.

The term refers to the use of multiple technology functions rather than a single technology stack and the creation of new business capabilities by intelligently and creatively integrating them.

The key premise of combinatorial innovation is the bespoke integration of technology functions.

Combinatorial innovation can partially relate to the invention process.

How combinatorial innovation differs from invention

The difference between pure invention and combinatorial innovation is the approach to the final products or services. To clarify, let me explain the difference between the perspectives of product and service requirements.

In the invention process, novelty prevails. The idea of the invention must be original. For example, the final product of an invention is a patent.

The legal claims must be original and non-disclosed items. The patent can be considered as a first-of-a-kind usable technology, tool, process, or method.

For combinatorial innovation, the new product or service can consist of multiple old ideas. The end result is combining these proven ideas in a creative, functional, practical, and agile way to address pre-determined use cases.

The focus of combinatorial innovation

The focus of combinatorial innovation is — rather than creating new technology stacks, tools, processes, and methods — combining the current best approaches for specific business functions and creating new business capabilities for customer and market demands.

From a conceptual perspective, a prime example of combinatorial innovation is a smartphone. A smartphone itself is not an invention. It comprises multiple inventions, including previously invented technology components such as central processors, memory, communications, navigation, messaging, applications, transistors, Internet technologies, and so on.

Business purpose and use cases

The business purpose of combinatorial innovation is to gain business advantage using multiple emerging technologies and to integrate them to solve business problems in an agile way.

Agile is one of the attributes to distinguish between traditional invention and combinatorial innovation. The invention process is time-consuming and hence not ideal for meeting urgent market demands. Whereas in combinatorial innovation practice, the timeframes can be shortened dramatically.

One of the prominent enabling technology for combinatorial innovation for digital transformation is the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). By using APIs and agile development methods, talented software development teams can integrate multiple services easily in a single-user application as a customer solution in a very short time, such as a few days.

Meeting this type of demand by using the classical invention and innovation methods can take months or even years, depending on the complexity of solution requirements and use cases.

Combinatorial innovation is vital for the digital strategy of products and services for modernizing and transforming business organizations.

Transforming business organizations leverage emerging technology stacks to create underlying support platforms by using various Cloud Computing service delivery models.

These transforming business organizations leverage IoT (Internet of Things) to collect data from objects. They use Big Data Analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques to gain insights from data coming from smart objects.

They use artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and virtual and augmented reality technologies to add remarkable intelligence to products and services to make them appealing to consumers.

Methodology and Approach

From a methodological perspective, the best approach to enable combinatorial innovation in the industry is the use of well-governed Design Thinking workshops. This practice brings sponsors, technical talent, and consumers to one place and enables them to co-create. I shared my experience with Design Thinking in this article.

There is remarkable progress in including combinatorial innovation in the digital transformation strategy. Industry trends are optimistic about the growth of combinatorial innovation in the digital space. For example, Gartner informs that combinatorial digital innovation will become vital to make the most of digital technologies and processes in the next decade.

Conclusions

As Gartner informs, combinatorial digital innovation is expected to become vital to making the most of digital technologies in the next decade.

Many transforming organizations are leveraging compelling use cases and the benefits of combinatorial innovation.

The critical success factors for combinatorial innovation are cultural diversity, synergistic fusion, technical excellence, and innovative collaboration.

You can check my point of view on these critical topics in the articles listed below.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a happy and healthy life.

Polymath Entrepreneur Builds Unicorn Business in 3 Years Using Combinatorial Innovation

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