I woke this morning to the rapid fire of a nail gun. Not in my room mind you, a roofer was working on a new house down the road.

I peered out the my window to see the roofer slowly walking across the roof popping nails in at hyper speed.

The nail gun is an amazing innovation. Manually hammering a nail in would easily take 20 seconds per nail. Plus, its exhausting. But with the gun he was putting in 3 nails a second. Nail guns represent a huge time savor.

Walking across the roof, though, hasn’t changed. It hasn’t been innovated. There is no hover craft for roofers. You don’t see them dangling off a crane so they can navigate the roof faster. There surely isn’t a roofer’s roller blade system.

It is obvious that roofer roller blades and hover crafts are dumb ideas. They don’t improve the process much, and they surely wouldn’t make roofing faster. The bottleneck is still how fast nails can be nailed (or shot) in.

When it comes to innovation, always innovate where you can make the biggest gains at the lowest costs. Innovate the things that can be sped up in a big way, or where the quality can be improved in a dramatic way or the costs can be cut tremendously. Of those things determine which is easiest and least costly to do. Start there. Repeat the big gains, low costs analysis to find your next innovation and then do that. And so on, and so on.

Are you innovating the next nail gun or the next roofer roller blades?