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The innovation pyramid: five approaches to strategic decision-making

Article in Journal of Business Strategy · May 2021

DOI: 10.1108/JBS-12-2020-0292

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The innovation pyramid: five approaches
to strategic decision-making
Manuel Hensmans

Introduction Manuel Hensmans is based

at Faculté Solvay Brussels
A plethora of dramatic innovation jargon is bandied about in media and consultant speak, School of Economics and
making it hard for organizational leaders to see the forest for the trees when it comes to Management, Université
aligning and committing to innovation priorities. This paper aims to identify and distinguish Libre de Bruxelles,
types of innovation in order of strategic importance for organizations. The most strategic Bruxelles, Belgium.
types of innovations provide organizations with the most sustainable competitive
advantage, i.e. a long-term commercialization advantage.
Based on ten years of studying different types of innovation, and helping hundreds of
Master of Business Administration and Masters students apply these insights to
organizations in different industries, the author proposes the innovation pyramid below,
which synthesizes and ranks the five most strategic types of innovations (Figure 1).
A first observation regarding the innovation pyramid is that, contrary to prevailing opinion,
cultural and organizational types of innovation such as management and business model
innovation are more strategic than technology-based types of innovation. This may surprise
some organizational leaders as the latter types of innovation are usually most heavily
advertised publicly. However, while they are important, they are easier to imitate and thus
less likely to provide a long-term advantage than business model and management
innovation.
In what follows, the author goes through the academic literature to refine our understanding
of these types of innovation and provide clarifying examples of each one. The author
explains why management and business model innovation are the most strategic types of
innovation, followed by radical, disruptive and product/service/process innovations.

What are product, service and process innovation?

A first type of innovation, often categorized as evolutionary and incremental (Burgelman
et al., 2009; Schilling and Shankar, 2019), concerns products, services and processes.
Product and service innovations occur in the output of an organization (Cooper and
Kleinschmidt, 1987; Lusch and Nambisan, 2015). If this output is a tangible product, it
concerns a product innovation. If it is an intangible service, it concerns a service innovation.
A process innovation, by contrast, is an innovation in the techniques of producing,
The author would like to thank
delivering or improving the quality of outputs, most notably through the advanced use of all his students for their
information technology or digitalization (Davenport, 1993). For instance, Dell has long contributions in testing the
innovation pyramid presented
distinguished itself from other computer vendors by cutting out the middleman (retail shops) in this paper. Many thanks also
to Nanci Healy for her editing
and providing a direct factory-to- customer delivery service that provides good quality, work on the first version of this
custom-built computers. A dynamic relation between product and process innovation has paper.

DOI 10.1108/JBS-12-2020-0292 VOL. 43 NO. 4 2022, pp. 229-238, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 0275-6668 j JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY j PAGE 229
 Figure 1 Innovation pyramid

long been observed (Utterback and Abernathy, 1975), with process innovations typically
following and perfecting product innovations. Service innovations either follow product
innovations in brick and mortar industries or provide the original innovation starting point in
fully digitalized industries (cf. Hensmans et al., 2001; Hensmans, 2017).

Defining the concept of disruptive innovation

Disruptive innovation is one of the most used but also abused terms (King and
Baatartogtokh, 2015). If we are to believe what is written on a daily basis, every innovation is
disruptive. It therefore pays to ground the concept theoretically and be more specific about
its practical distinctiveness. The concept of disruptive innovation was invented by a Harvard
Business School professor, Clayton Christensen (1997) with a very specific purview. The
author summarizes the essence of Christensen’s writings (Christensen et al., 2015;
Christensen and Overdorf, 2000) with this definition:
A disruptive innovation is a new product or service technology that is launched at the cheap
(low) end of a market, gradually improving in quality to move up market and eventually
displacing established competitors that build too expensive and complicated products/
services.

The definition begs the question: Why does disruptive innovation occur? Why do incumbent
firms allow upstart businesses to displace their technology? Figure 2 (adapted from
Christensen, 1997) visualizes the logic of disruptive innovation.

Figure 2 How disruptive innovation works

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The diagram is composed of a horizontal axis representing time and a vertical axis
representing performance. The four steps of the logic of disruptive innovation are placed on
the diagram. First, incumbents improve along a trajectory of sustaining innovation. Second,
sustaining innovation overshoots customer needs. Third, there is a disruptive innovation to
which incumbents have the ability to respond. Finally, incumbents are disrupted and
flounder.
Step 1. Companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve. Companies
pursue these “sustaining innovations” at the higher tiers of their markets because this is
what has historically helped them succeed. By charging the highest prices to their most
demanding and sophisticated customers at the top of the market, companies will achieve
the greatest profitability. For instance, Apple’s iPhones are becoming pricier and more
sophisticated with each generation, helping them capture the demanding premium
customer base.
Step 2. Eventually, however, most organizations’ sustaining innovation trajectory overshoots
customer needs and willingness to pay. They end up producing products or services that
are too sophisticated, too expensive and too complicated for many customers in their
market. Take Apple’s 10th-anniversary iPhone. It offers significant upgrades to the
smartphone’s display, camera and overall design. But it will cost no less than $1000, testing
mainstream customer loyalty beyond Apple’s core of unconditional fans.
Step 3. Incumbent firms’ tendency to pursue sustaining innovations unwittingly opens the
door to “disruptive innovations” at the bottom of the market. An innovation that is disruptive
allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market to access a product
or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of
skill. Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include
lower gross margins, smaller target markets and simpler products and services that may
not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional
performance metrics. Because these lower tiers of the market offer lower gross margins,
they are unattractive to other firms moving upward in the market, creating space at the
bottom of the market for new disruptive competitors to emerge.
Step 4. Over time, disruptive innovators’ technology offerings improve to the extent that they
capture the mass market from incumbents – whose historical advantages founder.

Example of disruptive innovation: Skype

The emergence of internet communication service Skype in a previously telecom-
dominated telephony world provides a stark example of disruptive innovation.
Step 1. By the turn of the 21st century, national telecommunications companies dominated
the trillion-dollar international telephony market. Benefiting from quasi-monopolies over
telephone services, telecom companies demanded hefty prices for ever better quality
international phone calls.
Step 2. International calls were perceived as a very expensive service to customers around
the world. Network quality improvements did little to change that perception, as most
people were content with a good enough service.
Step 3. Free Skype software was released in 2003. While doing so Skype’s co-founder,
Niklas Zennstrom, sent a clear message to the world: “We believe that you should not have
to pay for making phone calls in the future, just as you don’t pay to send e-mail.” During the
first years of its existence Skype was primarily successful with internet users who did not
mind the inferior quality of Skype calls. Over time, however, initial bandwidth problems were
overcome to bring the quality of Skype calls within the tolerance range of most internet
users. Extra features such as conference and video calls became useful to an ever-
increasing number of people. The disruptive character of Skype was further enhanced by

VOL. 43 NO. 4 2022 j JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY j PAGE 231

 the unwillingness of telecom companies to give up on their cash cow, drastically reduce the
price of international calls and rapidly embrace voice over internet protocol internet
technology. Although they already had mastery of this technology, it had been tested and
used successfully many times before and was not new to them at all!
Step 4. By 2009, international calls were as likely to be held via Skype as via traditional
telephone service. International telephony was being commoditized, forcing telecom
companies to drastically reduce their prices. Nevertheless, by 2012, the year Microsoft
acquired Skype, international Skype calls far exceeded traditional international calls.
Figure 3 visualizes the evolution of the international phone and Skype traffic over the years
2005–2012.

Radical innovation: beyond disruptive

Disruptive innovation does not concern radically new technologies. It involves challengers
incrementally adapting tried and tested technology to create a new market from the low
end. Radical innovation, by contrast, draws on risky technologies that require radical
capability leaps from the involved firm to create new markets – not specifically low-end
given the large investments and risks involved (McDermott and O’Connor, 2002; Schilling
and Shankar, 2019).
A good example of a radical innovation in progress is Virgin Galactic’s attempt to create a
new commercial market for space travel. To do so, it relies on the commercially unproven
technology of reusable space rockets. The capability leaps required from Virgin Galactic
are enormous even though the company is known for commercializing tried and tested
technologies. It has never been in the business of space rockets.
Further, the commercial risks of pioneering space travel are enormous. Statistically, 3% of
astronauts do not make it back alive while flying in the now tried and tested technology of
non-reusable rockets! Imagine Virgin having to respond to 3% of its space travel
passengers not making it back! The reputational consequences would be disastrous. In
2015, one pilot died while testing a Virgin Galactic spaceship.
Testifying to how hard and risky radical innovation is, Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic’s
founder, originally announced Galactic’s maiden flight for 2009, but the first commercial
flight still is not scheduled, although the firm is getting closer after a number of successful
test flights.

Figure 3 Disruptive effect of Skype

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Business model innovation: commercialization beats technological determinism

Performance effects of business model innovation. The innovation literature is filled with
discussions of technological determinism, portraying technology as the driving force of
organizational and societal success, following a naturally given logic that is not culturally or
socially determined (Bimber, 1994, p. 84; Hensmans, 2021, p. 23). From the vantage point
of building a long-term commercial advantage, business model innovation consistently
outperforms technological innovation (Amit and Zott, 2012; Carayannis et al., 2015;
Chesbrough, 2007; Kim and Min, 2015) although it entails coming up with new ways of
doing business using technologies that create, deliver and capture more value.
For instance, the reason Google’s entry into advertising was disruptive in the long term for
newspapers and magazines is because it was embedded in a business model innovation:
Google was the first internet company to come up with a commercially successful
advertising business model. The essence of Google’s/Alphabet’s success is a big data
advertising platform: more than 87% of Alphabet revenues come from providing big data-
driven, highly targeted internet advertising. Google is the second most visited internet
website after Facebook. It induces its users worldwide to give up their private data in return
for free services accessible on any internet device, whether it is a laptop, smartphone,
thermostat (Alphabet’s Nest business unit), smartwatch, car (Alphabet’s Waymo business
unit) or any other Internet of Things device.
That is also the reason Google invests in autonomous car technology. It is projected to
function as a major future gateway to internet-based communications. By creating and
adding popular applications (Maps, Search, Adwords, Android app development,
GooglePlay, YouTube, Android Auto) Google’s big data Platform becomes an obligatory
passage point for access to internet-based communications. This applies not only to users
but also equally to advertisers and application developers intent on reaching the greatest
number of people and ensuring commercial success.

Five elements of business model innovation. Business model innovation entails

differentiating the firm in five ways: customer value proposition, resources, activities,
partnerships and a matching profit or revenue mechanism (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Five elements of business model innovation

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 At the heart of business model innovation is a customer value proposition that stands out
from the crowd. How are you going to make your users or customers’ life easier, more
pleasant or more fulfilling? By knowing very well who the intended customers are, what their
unfulfilled needs are and what job you can do to help them out.
For instance, who are the main customers of Tesla, the electrical vehicle company and what
do these customers find unique about Tesla? The company came up with a rather unique
value proposition in the car industry: to provide a high status and green mobility alternative
to gas-guzzling cars but also electrical cars that at the time had an unfashionable design
and were unreliable in terms of driving range, battery charging and engine performance.
Tesla built a high-status green sports car targeted at specific customer groups, mainly
wealthy men of a mature age. Now that BMW and Mercedes and other luxury brands are
onto Tesla with equally high status and high-performance electrical cars, Tesla is trying to
distinguish itself once again by opening up its value proposition to a larger group of
customers with the Model 3 car. This is still a fashionable car, but instead of being sold at
more than 100,000 euros, Tesla will decrease the price to about 35,000 euro or lower.
To execute a distinctive customer value proposition, a firm needs equally distinctive
resources and competences. Tesla developed several, starting with a globally renowned
brand name, a superior electrical vehicle technology allowing an unprecedented 300 km
range, remote repair software and a premium battery charging infrastructure. Tesla also has
an iconic leader, a very important resource. Elon Musk counts as one of the visionaries of
Silicon Valley. By the same token, Tesla hires some of the best engineers in the world,
although it is experiencing severe talent competition from Google, Uber and high-end
European car manufacturers. What Tesla does not have yet is the capacity to scale up its
manufacturing operations for a mass electrical car. There still is work to be done on
resources and competences.
An original customer value proposition also comes with an original set of activities. While
most car manufacturers outsource car sales and repairs, roadside assistance and other
parts of the value chain, Tesla does it all. Tesla vertically integrates all parts of the value
chain and also manufactures its own battery technology and charging infrastructure. Much
of this was by necessity. As a first mover promising the highest quality, Tesla had to take
control and show by example.
Business model innovation also requires innovative strategic partnerships. While Tesla
vertically integrates, it could not have built up its position without cooperating and learning
from key partners. What is distinctive about Tesla is that its partnerships are well beyond the
boundaries of the traditional car industry. It has constructed a gigafactory for battery
technology with Panasonic and works with Solar City to ensure complementary solar power
energy for its battery technology. Vertical integration is expensive so Tesla secured cash
infusions from Toyota and Daimler in return for the exchange of electrical vehicle
technology. Most strikingly, Tesla is different in that it engages in open innovation. It opened
up its patterns to other manufacturers to ensure rapid progress and standardization of
electrical car technologies, a win-win strategy.
While business model innovation entails creating value for customers and partners, it also
requires appropriating profits for oneself or revenues if the firm in question is a not-for-profit.
Innovators across the world use a range of profits or revenue formulas. Tesla uses a
premium formula. It asks customers to pay a premium price for a very advanced and high
status car. In return, it offers free charging stations and cars that need relatively little
maintenance. In what follows, we summarize five of the main profit or revenue mechanisms
used by leading innovators across the world.
Five different types of profit/revenue mechanisms. Business model innovation can be
associated with many different profit mechanisms or revenue mechanisms. The latter is
particularly true for not-for-profits that seek net revenue or operating income increases

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rather than profits. The five main profit/revenue mechanisms are freemium, premium, razor
and blade, subscription and multisided platform, as elaborated in Table 1.

Management innovation: avoiding commercialization blind spots

Threat of innovation blind spots
An increasing number of leading scholars have come to realize that the key to obtaining a
long-term commercialization advantage is management innovation (Birkinshaw et al., 2008;
Hamel, 2006, 2009; Hensmans et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2012; Stata and Almond, 1989).
Established organizations have a tendency to develop blind spots to disruptive, radical and
business model innovation and cling to established ways of managing that brought success
in the past. Figure 5 provides a few notable examples of such blind spots leading to the
demise of leading firms or the missing of industry-transforming commercialization
opportunities.
The above examples illustrate the glaring blind spots that company executives can develop
toward disruptive, radical and business model innovations. Avoiding such blind spots
requires management innovation by integrating new management practices that incentivize
employees to commercialize all types of innovation even if they challenge the comforts of
the status quo. Management innovation provides the best guarantee of a long-term
research and development commercialization advantage because it is much harder to
imitate in practice than technological knowledge.

Table 1 Five types of profit/revenue mechanisms

Spotify Freemium
Allowing users to access a basic product or service for free but charging a premium to access advanced
functionalities
Tesla Premium
Charge premium for advanced design/functionalities and cheap/free access to complementary products/services
Gillette Razor and blade
Basic product is cheap or given away for free, while the consumables are expensive and sold at high margin.
Netflix Subscription model
Customers pay a recurring fee for ongoing access to a product or service.
Uber Multi-sided platform
An intermediary technology platform enables interactions between two (or more) groups; the platform owner charges
a fee per interaction.

Figure 5 Examples of blind spots

VOL. 43 NO. 4 2022 j JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY j PAGE 235

 Management innovation principles
Innovative management practices that work are integrated in the sociocultural fabric of how
an organization works, and integration is a time-consuming process that is hard for
managers to control or imitate. Notwithstanding its relative inimitability in practice, we can
distil a number of generic management innovation principles adopted by leading innovators
for 21st century innovation dynamics. Management innovators shift away from traditional
principles on the following:
䊏 the desired organizational structure of innovation;
䊏 how to control innovation processes;
䊏 how to reward innovation; and
䊏 and what type of people to recruit to foster innovation.

Firms like Google, Rocket Internet and Zara, but also P&G and other established
companies shift away from rigid, hierarchical control to embrace a flatter structure in which
organizational boundaries are fuzzier than in the past and amenable to task-oriented, cross-
disciplinary team formation. Of course, structure and discipline still are key, but only insofar
as they provide a controlled grounding of freedom and initiative. Instead of only focusing on
how to standardize innovation processes as much as possible (eliminating variation) and
controlling processes top-down, an increasing number of firms are learning to embrace
creativity (enhancing variety of innovation processes) and horizontal cooperation. That is,
although standardization will always remain important for established innovation processes,
firms like Lego and BMW do both. They indeed combine standardization of established
innovation products and processes and creative, open management practices for
disruptive, radical or business model innovations.
In terms of rewarding desired employee behavior, task autonomy and recognition of
achievements by peers is becoming more important than traditional finance and hierarchy-
based reward systems. Firms such as Deloitte, IBM, PwC and General Electric are
changing their evaluation and reward systems comprehensively in this direction.
Finally, while specific skills are still needed, recruitment based on the capacity to generate
idea, sponsor and orchestrate other people’s innovation efforts is becoming more popular.
This trend is emerging in industries as diverse as advertising, banking, internet software
and the public sector.

Table 2 Contrasting traditional and management innovation principles

Organization centered in
Traditional organization management innovation

Structure Bureaucratic – specialization and Flat – organization without

division of labor, hierarchical
control, defined organizational
boundaries
Processes Top-down control and emphasis
on eliminating variation
Reward systems Financial compensation and
promotion up the hierarchy
People Recruitment and selection based on
the needs of the organization
structure for specific skills:
functional and staff specialists,
general managers and operatives
hierarchical control, task-oriented
project teams, fuzzy organizational
boundaries
Loose controls to
foster idea generation and
emphasis on enhancing variation
Autonomy and recognition
Key need is for idea generators who
combine required technical
knowledge with creative personality
traits. Managers must act
as sponsors and orchestrators.

PAGE 236 j JOURNAL OF BUSINESS STRATEGY j VOL. 43 NO. 4 2022

Real-life examples
Video game developer Valve Corporation embodies all these trends. Valve does not have
any managers but works on a strictly peer-to-peer employee basis. Employees self-
organize and choose to work on the projects they prefer. Employees’ wages are based on
peer evaluations, not yearly management assessments. To fuel self-organization, Valve only
hires people with “freedom” traits, people who love autonomy and are brilliant enough not to
need a boss to guide them. Valve released an employee manual for new recruits which
readers can download here for fascinating reading.
Similarly, telecommunications firms Huawei and retail firm Tesco regularly recruit and Keywords:
promote people with “freedom” and “autonomous achievement” traits. For instance, Tesco’s Radical innovation,
ascendancy to one of the world’s leading retailers by 2010 was built on more than a decade Business model innovation,
of recruiting and promoting employees who could solve intractable problems (such as in Management innovation,
Disruptive innovation,
what locations to invest in) through unconventional competences (for instance, a Big Data Innovation types,
retail site research unit). Recruitment candidates at Tesco were explicitly tested on their Innovation pyramid,
ability to challenge conventional wisdoms and their willingness to withstand conformist Long-term commercializa-
pressures (Hensmans et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2012). Table 2 summarizes the above tion advantage,
Technological determinism
discussion of management innovation principles.

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Further reading
Hensmans, M. (2019), “A new matrix for building platform portfolios: how companies cansustain their
leadership”, Journal of Business Strategy, doi: 10.1108/JBS-08-2019-0162.
Hensmans, M. and Liu, G. (2020), “Huawei’s long march to global leadership: Joint innovation strategy
from the periphery to the center”, In Huawei Goes Global, (pp. 225-245). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Hensmans, M., Johnson, G. and Yip, G. (2012), Strategic Transformation: Changing WhileWinning,
Springer.

Corresponding author
Manuel Hensmans can be contacted at: mhensman@ulb.ac.be

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