Week 11 Reading Reflection

One topic that surprised me or stood out from my expectations was about the different types of innovation. I always thought that innovation was simply innovation, I had never thought of there being specific types that are appropriate to specific ideas. The multiples types include routine, disruptive, radical, and architectural. When a company is creating a new idea, they have to decide which type of innovation to decide upon. Companies have to decide how heavily to focus on technological innovation and their business model.

One part of the reading that was initially confusing to me was the concept of trade-offs and how it relates to crowdsourcing. The author explained how crowdsourcing can be helpful to companies because it offers an outside point of view from people who the company may not have been able to find on its own. There are websites like Linux and InnoCentive which help business acquire outside help which is considered to be outsourcing. This comes with an inhere trade-off, which I did not really grasp at first. I was not understanding where the trade-off was because I couldn’t see the negative effect.

If I was able to ask two questions to the author, I would ask him what types of innovation he thinks I should be focusing on and utilizing most for my business, and how I should communicate that to my customers. I think his opinion would be extremely valuable, and it would help me have a more complete understanding of what he wrote about in this review. If he could answer these questions, I could apply the topics he was describing and understand them more fully.

Overall, there was nothing specifically that I didn’t agree with throughout this business review. I think that most of the ideas put forward throughout this writing were not very opinionated, which made them easy to agree with. The author made a lot of really great points, and I learned a lot from this reading.