Why should you care about innovation? The question is very relevant considering it is being thrown around in just about every context in today's improvement culture. The article Innovation Walk Part 1 defined innovation for our purposes on this blog. We put forward that innovation is the process of creating valuable change, and not just change. To create a deeper context for innovation here are, from my perspective, the four primary goals:

1. Disruption: Disruptive innovation is typically about shifting competitive advantage by changing the value chain or value network. Examples of disruptive innovations include internal combustion engines, telephones, iTunes, television, the Internet and cell phones. While incremental innovation tends to improve existing products, services and processes, disruptive innovations replace them and make the old obsolete.
2. Speed: Innovations can be targeted to reduce time or accelerate schedules. A common reason for innovation is to reduce the time it takes to get to market. Too often, it is not our technical ability or our know how that keeps us from executing, it's that executing is too familiar. We get caught in ruts. Innovating for speed breaks the normal execution paradigms and gets us too our goal faster.
3. Operational Efficiencies: The problem with process and process improvement is that over time, they naturally tend to become bloated. When something goes wrong, we patch the process to prevent the failure. In some cases, we end up with more time spent on quality control then we do on the act of producing. Innovating for Operational Efficiencies is not just leaning out the process, it's about approaching the operation from a new perspective that can drive higher quality, lower cost and greater outputs.
4. Growth: In many worlds, growth is simply a function of doing more of the same. The same model, the same plan, the same market. But Innovation for growth is about changing the perspective and looking for ways to drive exponential growth. You can't do anything the same and triple output or revenue.

In all four cases, innovation requires us to change our perspective and drive new value into an existing problem.