Is novelty inherently bad? No. However, from a strategic business perspective, how should novelty factor into your business model or long term plan? It should be used cautiously and paired with the word temporary. Both Innovation and Novelty are cyclical, but their turnover rates are not equal. I subscribe to the theory that the life-cycle of novelty is much shorter than that of innovation.

I do believe that novelty can lead to innovation, but novelty should not be a long term strategy. When a product or service is novel, people are intrigued. As they become familiar with the item, however, their interest fades. This is the key reason why novelty is not a sustainable long term strategy.

Novelty can be a great play as a short term strategy (short term of course being relative, such as 1 to 3 years). This is because most novel things are easily replicated by competitors. This is true especially if you have just recently or not yet filed any trademarks or patents. The best example that comes to mind is that of alumnimum scooters in the late 1990's (think of Razor scooters). Many competitors jumped into this market and over saturated it causing Razor to lose out on substantial amounts of potential profit. This may have been a great market to jump into for 2 or 3 years, but companies that believed this was a long term market probably had excess inventory they couldn't sell when novelty faded.

Innovation by comparision can have a fairly lengthy life-cycle for various reasons. Several Potential Reasons:

• You may already hold key patents or trademarks that discourage competitors
• The product or service may be complex and hard for compeitors to replicate quickly or at all
• The product or service may be something consumers would not buy/replace often

Let me be clear, innovation can be disrupted by competitors, yet it is equally as likely the innovative company will disrupt itself and put another innovative product or service forth before a competitor can adapt. There are industries, like smartphones, that expect constant ongoing innovation in short cycles (3 to 6 months) but each industry will have unique innovation dynamics.

The best long term strategy is one of innovation that disrupts itself regularly. When working on company strategy consider having both novelty and innovation within your product and/or service mixture. Remember that Novelty and Innovation aren't polar opposites rivals that thrive on competing with one another.