I couldn't help notice the parallels between the diagram on "Ways to Grow" in Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez's article in the Design Management Review on "Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go" and the diagram Bob Truitt, serial biomedical entrepreneur and co-founder of Hemocleanse, presented in my biomedical entrepreneurship class.
The "Ways to Grow" figure, below, helps in identifying and prioritizing growth opportunities and ties them to the nature and type of innovation that would be required of a company. Using this diagram requires determining how the growth is going to happen and then matching that growth requirement to the innovation outcome.
The authors state that the benefit expected from innovating is growth. They say that not only is the value offered to the people (customers) in terms of experiences that make life better for them important but it is also important to keep other shareholders and other stakeholders invested in the venture happy.
For a technology company, it is important to also link up technologies to growth models and market conditions. The diagram below will help a company link the technology innovation type to the the growth model . Technologies that are highly innovative, which have high barriers to entry and high clinical value (clinical value translates to market value) will offer the highest profit margin and be sustainable over the longer term unlike commodity products.
What is interesting is mapping the innovation-growth diagram to the technology-growth diagram. From connecting the two diagrams it follows that ideal technologies are highly innovative and create new markets and/or are disruptive in nature. Such products are revolutionary in nature, while big company products and good technologies are evolutionary in nature. Commodities are high volume products that only see incremental innovation.



