Innovative Use of Exnovation

Yes, exnovation still can be used in modern business but must be taken with a pinch of salt

Innovation and exnovation are usually considered as opposite or contradictory concepts, models, and business practices. This view is valid in traditional settings. However, exnovation strategy can pose value propositions if it is applied innovatively even in modern business settings. This statement sounds paradoxical but it is applicable. I attempt to explain from my experience in the field.

As I touched on innovation and invention in multiple articles, I don’t want to repeat them here. You can check my views in the attached article.

While the focus of innovation is to extend functionality, usability, and quality of products and services in rapidly changing marketplace, the premise of the exnovation advocates has been to keep the quality with stringent governance over a long period of time.

The rationale of the exnovation advocates is managing brand quality with rigour from a centralized authority. This conventional approach keeps the rest of the team out of the product or service development lifecycle.

The primary use case for exnovation is considered to be reputable and traditional business brands. The popular business products using exnovation strategy are cars, airplanes, electricity grids, 5-star hotels. You can read one of the compelling arguments from here.

One may ask why innovation is more popular than exnovation. Or a more specific question can be why we don’t hear or read about exnovation, but the term innovation proliferates the media and even is ubiquitous in our lives.

The short answer is we are living in a transformative world. Things change rapidly. Disruptions are mined in every corner of business organizations, can explode out of the blue, and destroy the unprepared business organization in no time.

From a technological standpoint, digital transformation has been one of the main factors requiring innovation as it is a critical domain where substantial disruptions occur. The ways we listen to music, read books, do banking, and do shopping are different than the methods we used to perform these activities a decade ago.

If a business in above mentioned areas used exnovation as a business strategy a decade ago, you can imagine their competitiveness on these rapidly transforming markets. They would be out of business. That’s the reason we need to take exnovation strategy with a pinch of salt. It is context driven and context specific.

In my view, exnovation approach can still be used but only in the short term with a well-defined strategy, clear objectives, and robust risk mitigation. We can call this activity the centralized experimentation model.

To better understand the differences between innovation and exnovation approach, we need to understand the centralized and distributed (decentralized) experimentation models.

In centralized experimentation model, only authoritative domain experts are allowed to maintain innovation activities, and they can lock the features of products and services once the innovation activity is confirmed.

Whereas, in distributed experimentation model, extended teams in various ideation labs, collaboration hubs, and Design Thinking workshops can create new features for products and services in rapid iterations. You can check my views on Design Thinking in the attached article.

The pragmatic use of exnovation must follow a determined and well-controlled product life cycle. In practical terms, this means that we can still govern innovation activities centrally however, this governance needs to be dynamic and flexible enough to move to the next controlled version of a product or a service in a timely manner.

One example of innovative use of exnovation can be to segregate the products and services in two broad categories. We can apply the innovation strategy to the category one, e.g. fast-changing components requiring improvements with creative thoughts. We can apply exnovation to category two, e.g. stable components with established technology and processes. We can also create sub categories as apply.

To get the optimal benefit and mitigate imminent business risks from the innovative use of exnovation, we must integrate these two models and govern them using a robust lifecycle management approach.