When it comes to tech startups, we often talk about innovation — “digital innovation” (or “technical innovation”) in particular. It has, unfortunately, become a cliche, and now “innovation” is devoid of meaning. I’ve been trying to do some meaningful analysis of the “innovation landscape,” and to classify what is being called “innovation.”
The broad classification I got to is “technical innovation” vs. “process innovation.” In the majority of cases, tech startups are actually process innovations. They get existing technology and try to optimize a real-world process with it. Some examples of these processes would include “communicating with friends online,” “getting in touch with business contacts online,” “getting a taxi online,” “getting a date online,” “ordering food online,” “sharing photos online,” and so on. There is no inherent technical innovation in any of these — they either introduce new (and better) processes, or they optimize existing ones.