After years of studying innovation in the most successful large firms and Silicon Valley startups, we’ve come to a belief that companies that build a successful long-term track record with innovation do so because they work constantly at improving their products, processes, and culture. And they do so in an integrated way, treating all three areas as inextricably linked. Process improvements get made not through abstracted process reengineering projects, but as outcomes of teams of people working in new ways to create new products. Those new products shape the way the company thinks about itself — the dreams it can dream and the products it is capable of creating. This changes how work is done, and ultimately the company’s culture.
The key to building a sustained innovation capability means working on these three dimensions — products, processes, and culture — as one integrated, simultaneous effort. This means constantly working with relationships between very diverse factors, suggested by the partial list below.
| Products | Process | Culture |
| physical form | customer research | people |
| user interface | design & engineering | identity |
| design language | manufacturing | meaning |
| functionality | quality assurance | purpose |
| enabling technology | procurement | attitudes |
| product families | customer support | sensibility |
| line extensions | human resource management | vision |
| price | supply chain | mission |
| advertising | financial analysis | conversation |
| services | sales and marketing | style of work |
| total user experience |