The Progress Economy

The real question for innovators is not “how do we add value?” but “how do we enable better progress?”. Deliver what progress seekers truly want: improve their well-being through enabling better progress (functional, non-functional, contextual) with lower progress hurdles and quicker well-being recognition.

Defining Innovation in a progress-first world

Now we can expose the progress economy’s definition of innovation. We want innovation to improve well-being, which we know is achieved by enabling better progress towards a Seeker’s progress sought. That means the outcome of innovation is some combination of:

• increasing progress that is possible (towards progress sought)
• making progress that is possible today in a better way
• lowering one or more of the six progress hurdles
• accelerating potential for well-being recognition frequency

These four outcomes are at the heart of our progress economy’s innovation definition:

innovation: creating and executing new – to the individual, organisation, market, industry, world – progress propositions that offer improved progress potential through some combination of:

• increasing possible progress
• making today’s progress better
• lowering one or more of the six progress hurdles
• accelerating potential for well-being recognition frequency

whilst maintaining, or improving, the survivability of the innovator and/or ecosystem

I top and tail this definition with two important aspects. Innovations are new propositions (offers to help), and the entity offering the proposition should not be adversely impacted.

Introducing progress levers

Progress levers are key to transforming innovation from a game of luck to a systematic, successful, approach. They are aspects of the progress economy we can leverage to focus our creative energy when enabling better progress.

Several of these levers reveal themselves from our progress proposition definition. Levers such as updating the progress-making activities, or altering the resource mix; to looking how to get the proposition closer to progress origin and progress sought.

There are many more we uncover as we look at the remainder of our innovation definition.

Right, let’s expand the components of our exciting innovation definition.

Innovation: Creating and executing progress propositions…

We make progress by performing progress-making activities in which we apply capabilities (skills, knowledge, physical aspects such as strength, natural aspects such as power, or time, etc), through resource integrations.

When we have a lack of capability we likely fail to reach our progress sought (achieve maximum increase in well-being) or don’t even start our progress attempt. Where someone offers to supplement our capabilities so we can progress, then we are interested.

We call those offers progress propositions. They are bundles of supplementary capabilities. Specifically, a proposition’s resource mix and a proposed set of progress-making activities (you might recognise more as instructions, manuals, recipes processes etc).

Innovation creates (new) progress propositions.

Consider Peloton. It does not simply sell a bike; it combines:

• a bike (goods)
• live-streamed classes (proposed progress-making activities)
• gamified leaderboards and an online community (systems/data)

This combination appeals to Seekers looking to improve fitness (functional progress sought) in an engaging way (non-functional progress sought) whilst at home (contextual progress) than they might with a bike out on a street on their own.

Overlapping scope to progress journey

The last aspect I want to lift up for now is the overlapping scope of a proposition and Seekers progress journey is a rich source of innovation.

Propositions offer to help make progress towards a state of progress offered, usually from an assumed starting point (the proposition’s progress origin). In most cases those likely do not align directly with a Seeker’s current progress origin and their progress sought. See the diagram below.

A Seeker judges the well-being increase of engaging a proposition, before, during, and after engaging. Those judgements include how:

• close to their progress sought is the proposition’s progress offered
• far do they feel they can progress with the proposition to the progress offered
• close is the proposition’s progress origin to their own current progress origin
• low are the six progress hurdles
• far have they progressed compared to their progress sought

As a progress Helper, can you close the gaps between the two origins and/or between progress offered and sought? Should you innovate your proposition to offer more, or offer less, of the progress journey. Should you bundle other propositions to increase coverage. Or is unbundling your existing offer scope sensible (to offer choice to a Seeker – such as online retail might do with payment/delivery options; or to chase other markets such as Amazon did with its web services?

Taking Pelaton again, some gyms offer Peloton classes, appealing to those Seekers whose contextual progress sought gives a constraint that “at home” is not possible/wanted.

This is an example of how our definition of a progress proposition provides a rich tapestry for starting point into systematically exploring innovation. Now is a good moment to introduce progress levers.

I also include in our definition that innovations need to be executable. If we can’t implement and execute the proposition, then it can’t help the progress Seeker.

Time travel might perfectly satisfy a Seeker’s progress sought to go back in time and fix something, but it rarely translates into an executable proposition. In edge cases we could leverage the effects of general relativity. More likely, we give the illusion of time travel: introducing an “undo” function, or delaying sending an email to give a user a chance to stop it. Those are more realistic implementations.

Innovations/propositions should also be new – but what exactly does that mean?

…that are new to the individual, organisation, market, industry, or world…

Innovations need to be new (sometimes referred to as novel). That is true, otherwise we are looking at sales – though even there the sales process may lead to local innovation that can have wider benefit (see later). However, too often we’re caught up with misconceptions on how novel an innovation needs to be.

Old school thinking suggests innovation needs to be something never seen before. But this is not the case. Cloud-based ERP is not “new to the world,” but for a mid-market manufacturer adopting it for the first time, it is innovation. If it enables better progress than their current approach.

ISO’s innovation standard gives us start around thinking about novelty. Essentially saying it is up to those involved to determine how novel a proposed innovation is:

novelty is relative to, and determined by the perception of the organisations and interested parties

ISO 56000 (2025) – Innovation Management – Fundamentals and Vocabulary

I prefer a more quantitative definition. In the following table is Edison, bin Ali, and Torkar’s (2013) framing: innovation can be new to the individual, firm, market, industry, or the world.

This also guides us to the view that innovations may start off as new to the world but diffuse outwards becoming down the list of novelness.

CRISPR gene editing and the first quantum computers were new to the world. They offered entirely new progress that wasn’t possible before. Genetic diseases can be cured with CRISPR, and complex logistics challenges readily solved with annealing quantum computers. (Other quantum computing devices are further away from being realistic).

As with most breakthroughs, they will evolve into new to market or industry innovations as adoption widens and applications diversify. For example, a logistics company might begin leveraging anealing quantum computing to solve complex, dynamic route optimisation challenges in regions where planning was once static and manual. A new-to-industry innovation could be a construction firm adopting digital twins for project monitoring. That’s a practice originally developed within aerospace engineering.

At the new-to-firm level, a mid-sized hospital could deploy robotic process automation to streamline its billing process. They are applying a proven solution already in use across other healthcare settings.

One reason I like this definition is it suggests sources of innovation. What are other firms, industries and markets doing that you can take advantage of? This reflects the evolution of Seekers’ progress origins and sought that comes from their progress attempts across those firms, markets and industries. Seekers expect to do things with you they can in other markets/industries.

Carrying innovation from one market/industry to another

One way innovations move from one market/industry to another is when they are “carried” by a particular actor.

Den Hertog identified in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services As Co-Producers Of Innovation this often happens when consultants are active. They typically work in a wide range of industries and markets getting exposed to a wide range of ideas. We could expect they carry ideas from market to market and industry to industry. Are consultants you already engage included in your innovation activities?

There are many B2B examples of this carrying. Predictive maintenance, for instance, first proved itself in aerospace, where uptime and safety are paramount. It was then carried into manufacturing, logistics, and even energy infrastructure to reduce downtime and extend asset life. Agile development methods blossomed in software engineering and have been carried into hardware design, marketing, and even strategy development as organisations recognised their power to respond faster to changing Seeker needs.

Seekers can create a demand for innovations to be carried. They are involved in many progress attempts across many industries (and in a global economy, many markets). In those attempts they get exposed to innovations, and if beneficial, start expecting to see them in your market/industry.

The humble QR code is a good example of a blend of these factors. Born in manufacturing for tracking parts, it was carried into other industries/markets in the company to company way. Once the public got exposed to it, it flourished in retail, payments, transport, entertainment, and even healthcare.

Relation to Adopter types

I mentioned how as innovations diffuse they move down the novel categories. It is tempting to map that directly onto Rogers’ classic adopter types: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

Those categories are valuable. They offer deep insight into the psychology of adoption, the forms of marketing likely to resonate, and the conditions that accelerate uptake. Indeed, these dynamics surface in the progress economy as one of the six progress hurdles: adoptability.

But mapping adopter types directly to novelty is misleading. An innovation that is well established in one market, let’s say is being adopted by the late majority, may still be highly challenging to adopt in a different market/industry. It may once again require innovators and early adopters to lead the way.

Innovation diffusion is a fascinating topic, I have more about it over here.

Progress levers – What does new mean?

Beyond addressing the scope of the proposition – progress origin/offered – in relation to the Seeker’s progress origin/sought, new-ness can address individual aspects of the proposition – the resource mix and the progress-making activities.

So, innovations are propositions that are new to an individual, firm, market, industry or the world. To be attractive to a Seeker, they need to offer to improve their well-being, that is to offer an improved progress potential..

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