Innovation model

The four Ps of the innovation model overlap because there is the factor of perspective.  The innovation does not exist standalone in a successful business, because to make it profitable it must be inherently customer-focused.     

Looking at the Kindle Fire vs Apple iPad debate, we see how innovation can straddle sectors, depending on perspective.  The iPad undoubtedly conquered the market with the innovation of the first mass-marketable tablet computer. 

Amazon was not the early conqueror of the tablet market, but is looking to compete with similar innovations and capitalise where it has seen Apple’s failings.  Streaming is both a product and process innovation in competition with the iPad’s ‘local storage’, and this change could also offer a paradigm change in the way we consume tablet content.  Offering the Kindle Fire means the manufacturing of a new technology for Amazon (product innovation), but as a content-selling site, the multi-functional tablet also changes the mental perception of what it is a company provides perhaps further than their production of the e-reader (both process and paradigm).   

Positioning is a form of innovation that only comes in a more saturated market.  The iPad generally has a monopoly on the tablet device market at the moment, but when the day comes that everyone is using a tablet of all types, positioning becomes important to target specialised and specific consumers. 

For example, in a saturated newspaper industry, the Daily Mail was struggling to keep up with its vast number of competitors and its sister paper had to be closed.  The Mail repositioned itself as targeting female readers, the ‘gap in the market’, and is one of the most successful papers today.  New products may be positioned, or older ones re-positioned to target certain markets, such as business people (as Blackberry originally did), or perhaps children.