Positioning
What "innovative" actually means to an endorsing body
Almost everyone told "your idea isn't innovative enough" has a perfectly good business. The problem is usually that the business is good rather than new — and those are different tests. This is what the innovation test is actually asking.
Updated · 3 min read
The wording, and what it implies
The requirement is an original business idea that meets a new or existing market need. Read that as two obligations, not one. Original means it is not a copy of a model already operating here. Meets a market need means the originality has a point — novelty with no demand behind it fails just as hard as a copy.
What does not count as innovation
- Cheaper. Price is a strategy, not an innovation, and it is trivially copyable.
- Better customer service. Everyone claims it; nobody can evidence it in advance.
- A well-run version of an existing model — a new agency, a new restaurant, a new consultancy.
- "There is nothing like this in my country." The assessment is about the UK market.
- An app wrapper around a process that already has three established UK apps.
Four angles that do hold up
When I work on positioning, the defensible angle is almost always one of these:
- Method — you do the same job through a genuinely different process, with a measurable consequence (faster, cheaper to serve, possible at a scale competitors cannot reach)
- Technology — something you build or own, however modest, that competitors would have to build too
- Business model — a change in who pays, when, or for what, that unlocks a customer who currently cannot buy
- Underserved segment — a specific group the incumbents structurally cannot serve well, with a reason they cannot
The one-sentence test
You should be able to finish this sentence without hedging: "Today, UK customers who need X have to do Y, which fails because Z — we do it by W instead." If the sentence needs three clauses of context, an assessor will not follow it either. If it collapses into "we do it better," the positioning work has not happened yet.
Then check the honesty of it. An interview will probe whichever claim is weakest, and an innovation angle invented for the form will not survive the second follow-up question. The goal is not to sound novel; it is to find the part of your business that genuinely is, and lead with that.
If you have already been told the idea isn't innovative
That feedback is more useful than it feels. It usually means the assessor could not locate the difference, not that no difference exists. Reapplying with the same framing rarely changes anything — reshaping the framing sometimes changes everything.