The Ten Types of Innovation: A Lens for Where to Improve

When something hurts repeatedly, most teams reach for the same fix: automate the workflow. The Ten Types of Innovation is a lens that asks whether that is really the best move, or whether the value sits somewhere else.

What are the ten types of innovation?

The Ten Types of Innovation is a framework that sorts every kind of business innovation into ten types, grouped into three: configuration, offering, and experience. It was developed by Doblin, the innovation firm founded by Larry Keeley and now part of Deloitte, and set out in full in the 2013 book Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel and Brian Quinn. The framework came out of Doblin's analysis of more than 2,000 successful innovations, and its core argument is simple and well-evidenced: innovation is broader than building a better product, and the innovations competitors find hardest to copy are usually not the product at all.

This is Doblin's work, not ours. We borrow it here because it does one job well: it widens the question from "how do we make this faster?" to "where could a change actually create value?"

The three groups, from internal to customer-facing

The ten types run on a spectrum from how the business is built to how a customer experiences it. The three groups mark the bands on that spectrum.

• Configuration — the innermost workings of the business: how it makes money, who it partners with, how it is organised, and how it operates. Four types: profit model, network, structure, process.
• Offering — the product or service itself, and the system of products around it. Two types: product performance, product system.
• Experience — how customers discover, buy, and feel about what you sell. Four types: service, channel, brand, customer engagement.

Doblin's analysis of historical innovations found that companies over-invest in the offering group — the product — even though configuration and experience innovations tend to be more durable and harder to imitate. That imbalance is exactly the trap this guide is about.

The ten types, briefly

Here is each type in plain terms.

Configuration

1. Profit model — how you make money: the pricing, the revenue logic, what you charge for and what you give away. A shift from one-off sales to subscription is a profit-model innovation.
2. Network — how you work with others to create value: partnerships, alliances, and supply relationships that let you do more than you could alone.
3. Structure — how you organise and deploy your people and assets: the way talent, teams, and resources are arranged so the business runs well.
4. Process — how you do your work: the methods, activities, and operations that produce and deliver the offering. Automating a workflow lives here.

Offering

1. Product performance — the features, quality, and capability of the product itself: making the thing do more, do it better, or do it more reliably.
2. Product system — how separate products and services connect into a wider whole: bundles, platforms, and ecosystems that are worth more together than apart.

Experience

1. Service — how you support and enhance the offering around the sale: onboarding, help, guarantees, and the care that makes the product easier to use and trust.
2. Channel — how the offering reaches customers: the routes, touchpoints, and places through which you deliver and sell.
3. Brand — how you represent the offering and the business: the identity, reputation, and meaning customers attach to you.
4. Customer engagement — how you foster a relationship and a sense of connection: the interactions, communities, and moments that build loyalty beyond the transaction.

Why this matters when something operational hurts

Faced with repeated operational pain, most teams reach for one of the ten types and stop: process. The instinct is to take the painful workflow and make it faster — automate it. That is often right. But "automate the process" is one answer out of ten, and reaching for it by reflex means you never check whether the better move was structure, service, channel, or customer engagement instead.

The ten types work as a checklist against that reflex. Run your pain past each type and ask: is the real fix here a different operating structure? A service wrapped around the product? A new channel to reach people? A way to engage customers that removes the pain at source rather than processing it faster? Sometimes the most expensive thing you can do is automate a process that should not have existed in the form it does.

"Before you automate the process, check you're not just doing the wrong thing faster." — The Control Standard

Internal value versus customer-facing value

The three groups map cleanly onto a decision this site cares about a great deal: whether software you build should face inward or outward. Configuration types — process and structure especially — are where internal software lives: tools that make your own operations cheaper, faster, and more reliable. Experience types — channel, service, and customer engagement — are where customer-facing software lives: tools that change how customers find you, buy from you, and feel about you.

That distinction is worth its own decision, because the two earn their keep in different ways. The internal-versus-external choice — and how to tell which one a given pain calls for — is the subject of customer-facing vs internal software. The ten types are simply a wider map of the same terrain: configuration on the inside, experience on the outside, offering in between.

How to use the lens, then make the call

Use the ten types to find the right kind of improvement, then use this site's tools to decide whether to build it. The sequence is straightforward:

1. Name the pain. A recurring, costly headache — the kind worth fixing.
2. Run it past all ten types. Don't stop at process. Ask which type the highest-value move actually sits in.
3. If the answer is a process or structure change, check it's worth systemising first. Automating an unclear process just makes the mess faster — see systemise before you automate.
4. Then test whether to automate at all. When to automate a process gives the practical test: frequent, stable, costly, rules-based work earns automation; rare, judgement-heavy work usually does not.

For the wider picture of turning repeated pain into something you can control with people, process, or software, start with the systemising pain hub.

The ten types tell you where a change might pay off. To find out whether a specific recurring pain is worth fixing — and whether the fix is software, a clearer process, or neither yet — the free Pain Automation Score below scores one in about five minutes and tells you what to do with it.