Silent Innovation

Harvard Professor, Gary Pisano, thinks innovation means change that creates economic value. Innovations can be about technological change, business model change, or some combination of both. In his framework, there are four types of innovation.

1. Routine innovation builds upon a company’s existing technological competencies and exploits the existing business model.
2. Disruptive innovation, a concept made popular by my colleague Clayton Christensen, involves major shifts in a company’s business model.
3. Radical innovation involves a major change in technology, but unlike disruptive innovation it reinforces the existing business model.
4. Architectural innovation is a radical change in technology that simultaneously involves the creation of a new business model. That’s obviously the most challenging.

Reverse innovation or trickle-up innovation is an innovation seen or used first in the developing world, before spreading to the industrialized world.

Slow innovation focuses on changes that you see coming but that may not be ready to transform your business immediately. It’s understanding, for example, how automation and self-driving cars will slowly but radically transform job markets and proactively building new strategies to address those changes.

Here are 10 other types of innovation.

My take is somewhat different.

Here's what physician entrepreneurs should know about innovation.

Quiet quitting, the contemporary spin on employee disengagement, refers to doing the minimum requirements of one’s job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary. As such, it is something of a misnomer, since the worker doesn’t actually leave their position and continues to collect a salary.

Quiet firing describes how managers fail to adequately provide coaching, support and career development to an employee, which results in pushing the employee out of an organization.

Quiet startups reveal little information about their products initially. When no one knows who you are or what you do, you need to buck conventional wisdom and launch quietly, without fanfare. They stay dark for a while.

Quiet innovation, particularly if you are an intrapreneur i.e an employee trying to act like an entrepreneur, means not exposing or launching your idea too soon. It is an intrapreneurial survival skill.

There’s productivity and then there’s “slow productivity,” which can be more fruitful, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amid the noise of instant messaging, email and video calls, workers have grown frenetic. To improve output, they must learn to say yes to fewer things and relentlessly prioritize, according to Cal Newport, author of “Slow Productivity.” The book counsels knowledge workers to stop being always on and instead get down to “real work,” or run a greater risk of replacement by artificial intelligence.

Here are the advantages of quiet innovation:

1. You have time to test your ideas
2. It is less likely someone will steal your idea
3. It is less stressful, and you can choose your own pace of progress
4. You can get feedback
5. You have time to choose and depend on a sponsor
6. You will not be an obvious target to vested interests who don't want you to succeed
7. It can save money
8. You have more time to choose and test your team
9. You can measure the results of a "soft launch" like some restaurants or retail stores
10. You can think big, start small and stay small for a while
11. You can kill your idea faster and cheaper
12. You can avoid having to put one more thing on your failure resume.

Put this on your quiet innovation play list

Follow the Goldilocks rule...not too fast, not too slow, just right. Forget going fast and breaking things. Instead, innovate your heart out. Just don't tell anyone you are doing it until the time is right.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs