Develop a mindset of strategic innovation that combines creativity with business viability. Discover how to turn disruptive ideas into market-ready solutions, questioning “innovation for the sake of innovation” to focus on processes that build a competitive advantage and long-term organizational sustainability.
Many products include layers that only certain groups of users actually use, while others pay the same price without perceiving any imbalance. The ProRAW mode on the iPhone by Apple, for example, enables professional-grade photo editing: photographers value it, but most users don’t even know it exists. Product maturity lies in understanding what truly drives purchase, what retains users, what defends against competitors, and what is simply excess.
The obsession with finding a killer app is ultimately the search for the perfect monopoly. It is not just innovative software, but the element that makes an entire platform indispensable, reshapes markets, and locks out competitors. From Byzantium to WhatsApp, killer apps validate technological empires and concentrate real economic power.
As of early 2026, Web3 remains a promise with significant potential, but mass adoption is held back by barriers around usability, security, regulation, and the lack of compelling everyday use cases. While Web 2.0 continues to dominate through convenience and network effects, the trend points toward Web2.5: applications that hide blockchain complexity, delivering ownership and transparency without user friction.
In saturated markets, innovation no longer comes from new needs, but from removing friction in existing solutions. Complexity, lack of control, or slow processes create unnecessary user costs. Identifying, validating, and monetizing these frictions — with data and rigor — has become a key driver of real value creation.
The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is not an excuse to improvise. Speed does not replace upfront analysis or methodological rigour. An MVP should validate how a real market interacts with a value-creating solution, not justify failed prototypes caused by a poor understanding of the problem, the industry, or the customer.
Portfolio-based businesses enjoy stability, but that same recurrence acts as an anesthetic that slows innovation. Sectors like insurance or healthcare show deep-rooted inertia, slow processes, and outdated technology. Innovating requires investment and delayed returns — a tough proposition for organizations, especially publicly traded ones, trapped by short-termism and pressure for immediate dividends.
Innovation is not just about creating something new, but about improving what already exists in order to generate, deliver, and capture value. This methodology offers a rigorous framework to understand why new solutions emerge: identifying the underlying need, how it was previously satisfied, which frictions are addressed, and which factors have enabled the new model. A framework applicable to both startups and established companies.