# Doblin's 10 Types of Innovation Doblin's 10 types of innovation extend innovation past the product itself, into the profit model, network, structure, process, channel, brand, and related types. **The question.** In which of the ten types is the competitor's edge, and in which types is nobody in this industry trying? ## When to use it - A client is losing to a rival whose product is no better than its own, and nobody can say why. - The innovation pipeline is ten projects, all of them new features. - Several internal ideas need a common vocabulary so they can be compared and combined. - You are preparing an ideation session and want to pull people out of product thinking before it starts. ## When to avoid it - You need to size, rank, or sequence opportunities. The types identify where to look and say nothing about which move is worth more. Use a business case, or Three Horizons for the portfolio view. - The client's problem is operational and not about innovation, or it is a specific product design problem where Design Thinking is the better tool. - You cannot get evidence on competitors, as with private firms that publish little. The marks become guesses and flatter whoever drew them. - The client wants a single answer from a checklist. The types produce a map of where to look, and someone still has to choose. ## Overview The ten types sort innovation into three groups: configuration, which covers the profit model, network, structure, and process; offering, which covers product performance and product system; and experience, which covers service, channel, brand, and customer engagement. A consultant uses it to see where a client and its rivals are actually innovating, and where nobody is. The point of the framework is to move attention away from product features, which are the type most firms look at first and rivals copy fastest. It works as a diagnostic of what a company does, and as a prompt to combine types. It does not rank the types, and it was derived from successful cases only, so test any combination it suggests. ## Three groups, ten types ### Configuration The inner workings of the business. Profit model is how the business collects and prices revenue. Network is what it does through partners, alliances, or other companies' assets. Structure is how people, assets, and incentives are organized. Process is the distinctive way it does its core work. These are the hardest for an outsider to see and often the hardest for a rival to copy. ### Offering What is sold. Product performance covers features, quality, and function. Product system covers how products and services connect, bundle, or work together. The Doblin authors point out that product performance is where most firms look first and is the easiest to match, which is part of the case for looking elsewhere. ### Experience What the customer meets. Service is the support and help around an offer, including how easy it is to try and use. Channel is how the offer reaches the customer. Brand is how it is represented and recognized. Customer engagement is how interactions with the company feel, and what they let the customer do. ## What it is not - A checklist to complete. The authors argue that strong innovations combine a few types, which is different from doing all ten. - Ten kinds of product idea. Only two types concern the offering itself, and most of the value is in looking at the others. - A scoring model. Counting the types a company uses shows where it has put effort, not how healthy it is, and no validated scale says how many are enough. ## The steps 1. **Define the unit and the comparison set.** Choose one business or offer and two or three competitors, including at least one that is winning. Name the customer segment, so the marks refer to the same market. 2. **Gather evidence for each type.** For each type, ask what the company has done that differs from the industry norm. Use pricing pages, partner announcements, job postings, store visits, and customer comments. Mark each as shown, suspected, or none. 3. **Read the pattern.** Look for types where every firm in the industry competes, such as product performance, and types where nobody has tried. Note which types the client uses and which the strongest rival uses. Output: a map of the three or four firms across the ten types. 4. **Combine two or three types into a candidate move.** A single-type move is easy to copy, so build ideas that pair types, such as a new profit model with a new channel. Write each as a sentence a customer would recognize. 5. **Test each candidate against capability.** For each candidate, ask what it needs in people, partners, and systems that the client lacks. Pick one or two to take into a test. Output: a short list with the capability gaps named. ## In practice The exercise took forty minutes. For each of three rivals, the consultant had a building-maintenance firm's managers mark every type where public evidence showed a move that differed from the industry norm. The firm had been matching a competitor on price and service contracts and losing building managers anyway. The mapping showed why. The client's own marks were on product performance and process, where its dispatch was good. The rival had three marks the client lacked: a fixed monthly fee instead of per-visit billing, a tenant app for service requests, and a promised response time. Price was nowhere in the pattern. The managers stopped benchmarking on price and agreed to test a fixed-fee plan with a handful of existing buildings, with someone assigned to check what it would take to support a response-time promise. ## What you leave with - A map of the ten types for the client and two or three competitors, with the evidence behind each mark. - A list of the types where the industry is crowded and the types where it is empty. - Two or three candidate moves, each combining more than one type. - The questions that must be answered before any candidate is funded. ## Failure points ### Marking from impressions The team scores types from brand feeling and memory, with no evidence. The result is flattering to the client and wrong about the rival. ### Counting instead of combining A firm with six marks is read as more innovative than one with three, though the three might be a profit model, a channel, and a brand that reinforce each other. The framework's own claim is about combinations. ### Fighting over the labels Teams spend an hour deciding whether a move is channel or customer engagement, or product system or network. Label the observable move, accept borderline cases, and go on to what the pattern shows. ### Ending at the map The diagram is finished, the workshop is judged a success, and no move is chosen and no capability check is done. A map does not change what the client does. ### Treating the framework's origin as proof Because the types came from successful cases, they cannot show which combinations fail. Use them to generate options and then test the options. The failures above are usually [Leverage & IP](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/your-edge/#leverage): it was used once, and nothing was left that makes the next engagement easier. ## Origin Doblin was founded in Chicago in 1981 by Jay Doblin and Larry Keeley. The firm says it identified the ten types in 1998. In the book's account, the authors took a list of more than 2,000 successful innovations and applied a proprietary algorithm to group them into ten categories. The book that explained how to use them, Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs, followed in 2013 under Keeley, Pikkel, Quinn, and Walters. Deloitte acquired Monitor Group, and with it Doblin, in 2013, and the work now sits in Deloitte Digital's applied design and innovation practice. Deloitte marks Ten Types of Innovation as a registered trademark. This note describes the types in its own words and does not reproduce the official wheel. The authors describe the algorithm as proprietary, and the grouping was derived from successful cases, so treat it as a classification and not a tested theory of what causes success. ## Further reading - [Ten Types of Innovation, Deloitte Digital](https://www.deloittedigital.com/us/en/accelerators/ten-types.html). Deloitte's current page for the framework, with its own description of each of the ten types and the three groups. Read it for the official definitions before you present the types to a client. - [Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Ten+Types+of+Innovation:+The+Discipline+of+Building+Breakthroughs-p-9781118504246). The Wiley page for the 2013 book by Keeley, Pikkel, Quinn, and Walters, with the publisher's account of how the types were derived. The book is paid. ## Related frameworks - [Business Model Canvas](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/business-model-canvas/): Covers the configuration and experience types as blocks on a page. Pick it when you need to describe one model in full and not scan for where to innovate. - [Value Proposition Canvas](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/value-proposition-canvas/): Goes deep on the offering and what the customer is trying to do. Pick it when the offer, and not the model around it, is the weak point. - [Lean Startup](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/lean-startup/): Tests a candidate move cheaply. Pick it once the types have produced an idea and you need to know whether customers want it. Last updated October 19, 2026.