Mile Marker may be a product studio, but we appreciate that there are many ways to innovate outside of the creation of a new product. Innovation doesn’t always show up in some grandiose fashion - sometimes it is a small tweak from normal that brings us a powerful shift.
Visual Capitalist’s article “10 Types of Innovation: The Art of Discovering a Breakthrough Product” breaks innovation down into 3 larger categories - Configuration, Offering, and Experience - and then further down into 10 types including topics such as Profit Model, Product Performance, and Brand. For a deeper look at just what each of these vague titles means, Visual Capitalist offered this chart offering 100 different ways to approach such innovations.
Mile Marker’s June Not-a-Book Book Club group discussion centered around this article. Caroline, one of our engineers, discussed just how broad the concept of innovation truly is and how the way the article broke down the categories really drives that point home and Tomas, another of our engineers, appreciated the depth with which each category was explored - he reflected that innovation has become such a buzzword that we’ve lost a sense of what it really means. Geoff, our Product Manager, observed that innovation rarely falls into just one of the categories presented by the article - we often innovate by combining two more more of these concepts.
Naturally, we steered the conversation toward innovation here at Mile Marker. Our initial assessment of how Mile Marker is already innovating illustrated the many different perspectives of our team members. Fritz, one of our engineers, commented that our month-to-month contract model is rarely seen in the software space in favor of project-based contracts, with our model in turn allowing for a truly agile framework. Caroline noted that our brand and strength in customer engagement are strengths we should continue to lean into as they also set us apart from our competition.
We found this article led to a highly successful NABBC for us as the conversation will not be ending here; we will be continuing our discussion about innovation and what we believe Mile Marker is capable of. Raven, our Project Manager, asked us to start looking through the list of 100 tactics to see where our opportunities are; what strengths do we already have that we aren’t leveraging, and what new ideas are natural next steps for our team? We will also be challenging our new clients to explore this exercise during their 2 Week Product Sprints with us - let’s innovate together!