Innovating or Renovating?

I constantly see that almost every software organization claiming to be Innovating. In my decades of software engineering experience working for organizations that are 50+ years and very recent startups, a very handful of organizations are actually innovating, but most are renovating. Let me explain what I mean by that. 

Innovation is typically means a radically new business idea or product, much like VoIP, ride-sharing (when it came out) etc. Thanks to my time as a technology leader at a large insurance company's Innovation department, it became clear to me that making incremental technology changes to enhance the existing product is more aligned with renovating. Innovation by accident is rare, but innovative organizations make a dedicated and long-term effort at ideating over different ideas gathered from various sources to understand their feasibility, profitability etc. These ideas can be dozens or more in a year taken via innovation-funnel using a fail-fast principle. Only a handful ideas make it through the funnel to be taken up for MVP development and evaluation and far fewer actually become commercially viable product or service. 

During the decade as consulting architect at a large farm, I partnered with Fortune-500 companies to modernize their application, infrastructure and processes with cloud-native, microservices, and IaC. These mostly catered to an existing business model or product but doing it in a modern way. Hence, most of these would fall in renovating category. At a very fast paced financial services company in the earlier days of my career, I noticed a lot of such renovation, using automation, DevOps, private cloud, but catering to an established set of products with some enhancements in capabilities and delivery process. 

At the onset of my professional journey, I worked a 50 yr old travel and transportation service provider. They offered a very modern set of services and products for that time using SaaS and usage based pricing for their multi-tenant products. Most of these terms SaaS, Multi-tenancy, Subscription had not been coined. Their technology wasn't the most modern, but their products and services were much ahead of time. They didn't realize their strength and started focusing on modernizing their product without protecting their IP and a few years later came Google flights.  

Renovation can improve efficiency and profitability, sometimes it can take products much further and establish as the market leader. Take the example of Google Chrome, it wasn't the original browser, but it became the most advanced and popular browser by adding features and enhancements continuously. Similarly, Kubernetes, another Google contribution, wasn't the first container orchestration, but it managed to outshine it's predecessors. None of these were accidents, they were very intentional and required long term investment, planning, funding and adding those unique features to the product iteratively before competitors. Continuous cycles of renovation can lead to better market position and emerge as innovative product.