As a portfolio, your innovation efforts should ideally focus on improving the core business (incremental innovation), transforming the core business (sustaining innovation) and disrupting the core business and creating entirely new businesses (disruptive innovation). Anchoring your innovation strategy in these three distinct types of innovation helps connect innovation to both the current and future direction of the organization. It demystifies the whole concept of innovation, which can be fairly amorphous for those outside the executive suite (and sometimes even within the executive suite), molding the idea into something concrete.