Digital innovation
Digital innovation
This domain tests how digital products, services and processes come into being and spread: why some are adopted, some stall, and some displace what came before. Precision matters - new, improved and disruptive are not synonyms.
Core rules and concepts
- Invention, innovation, diffusion. An invention is a new idea or artefact; innovation is its implementation in a market or organisation; diffusion is how it spreads through a population over time.
- Digitization, digitalization, digital transformation. Converting records to digital form; using digital technology to change processes and business models; an organisation-wide shift in strategy, structure and culture.
- Types of innovation. Incremental improves existing measures; radical is new to the world; disruptive (Christensen) starts at the low end or in underserved segments, is initially weaker on mainstream measures, improves, then displaces incumbents.
- Diffusion (Rogers). Innovators (about 2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%), laggards (16%). Adoption depends on relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability.
- Design and constraint. Human-centred design, prototypes and minimum viable products, iteration and user testing; enablers and barriers include infrastructure, cost, skills, standards, data, intellectual property and regulation.
- Costs beyond the product. Energy use, e-waste and the rebound effect, where efficiency gains raise total consumption.
Worked example
A clinic replaces telephone triage with an AI chatbot. It is not an invention - the model already exists; the innovation is the redesigned service. Not digitization, but digitalization: the triage process changes. It becomes transformation only if roles, funding and workflow are restructured, and disruptive only if it begins with simple, low-acuity cases at lower cost and then improves. On diffusion, relative advantage is strong (24/7 access), but compatibility is weak for older and non-English-speaking patients and perceived complexity is high for staff. So: pilot on low-risk cases, measure safety and equity, then iterate.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling anything new or popular disruptive.
- Assuming innovation equals progress.
- Ignoring non-adopters and excluded groups.
- Forgetting infrastructure, cost and regulation as constraints.
- Treating diffusion as instant rather than a curve with a chasm.