According to Jay Doblin, there are ten types of innovation. These fit into four categories: Finance, Process, Offering and Delivery. The ten types of innovation are:

FINANCE
1.  Business Model, how the enterprise makes money (Dell).
2. Networking, enterprise’s structure/value chain (Walmart).
You go to get the best price, not the best customer experience.

PROCESS
3.  Enabling process (Siebel)
4.  Core process (GE Capital)

OFFERING
5.  Product performance (Intel Pentium 4)
6.  Product system (Microsoft Office)
7.  Service (Fed Ex)

DELIVERY (really around experience)

8.  Channel, how you connect your offerings to your customers (Niketown)
9. Brand, how you express your offerings benefit to customers (Virgin)
.
Virgin aren’t saying how do we make our planes better, they are saying how do we make the experience better.
10. Customer Experience, how you create an overall experience for customers (Lexus)

I thought the two graphs below were really interesting, graph 1 shows where the greatest volume of innovation efforts have been focused, and graph 2 shows which innovation efforts have delivered the most value.

As seen in the first graph, the vast majority of attention is given to the offering itself, particularly product performance.

But  as is seen in graph 2, a lot of value can also be created by innovating in the finance, process and delivery areas, particularly innovating in the finance category such as with design of business model and networking approach. Product performance is not the only area where businesses can focus on innovating to create value.