By Marc Drucker, Author “How Leaders F-Up Innovation”
Understanding effective innovation strategy means recognizing that not all innovators operate the same way. There are different kinds of innovation thinkers in the world, and they’re not all created equal.
One type is only able to innovate what’s already in front of them. They’re adaptable, responsive, and often successful. They see a problem in their immediate world: a friction point in a workflow, a gap in a product they use, a better way to organize something in their team. They solve it. These are “Lead Users” (a term popularized in innovation research), and this is how most people innovate most of the time. It’s low-risk, low-return, incremental and consistent. This innovation doesn’t meaningfully improve a business, but it does let marketing call something old, new again.
Another type gets magazine coverage. They’re the breakthrough innovators, the ones who imagine something radically new and bring it to life. They see five or ten years ahead and build the future everyone didn’t know they needed. We know their names. They’re celebrated in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and on TED stages. And they’re rare, partly because this kind of innovation requires a specific combination of vision, a lot of resources, and luck. This is the dream of the Blue Ocean strategy (one of the most influential books on innovation) and of companies that want to redefine their categories. These are moon shots: high-risk, high-reward bets on transformational change.
Every company I’ve worked for has moon shot projects and sometimes moon shot teams. These are exciting and have outstanding potential, but the moon shot success rate is near nil for all but the best funded, long horizon initiatives, which is why only a few exceptional companies consistently succeed at moon shots.
The third type is the most difficult. But for those companies that hire the right teams and build the right systems, it can be a consistent funnel of category leading innovations and a long-term competitive moat.
Why 18 Months: The Optimal Innovation Timeline
Eighteen months is the sweet spot for effective innovation strategy. It’s far enough out that you can see genuine shifts coming in technology adoption, in market maturity, in cultural readiness. It’s close enough that you can actually influence how that future unfolds. It’s the gap between what exists today and what the market will pay for, want to use, and be ready to build around. This timing has become a proven framework in product development strategy across industries.
A product built for today will be commodity within 18 months. A product built for 18 months from now lands exactly when the market recognizes it was missing something. By the time competitors notice and react, you’ve already captured the early adopters, refined the offering, and moved another 18 months ahead.
This applies whether you’re building software, a service, a team, a company, or a career. The 18-month thinker asks: What will this world need that doesn’t exist yet? What changes are already in motion that most people haven’t noticed? What can I build now that will feel inevitable in a year and a half?