How do you balance innovation with cost and time-to-market in hardware development?

Managing innovation can be highly contextual, depending on how much your organization can afford. This affordance can be either monetary or time to market.

Large Vs Small companies - Large companies can afford to wait and perfect a product before they launch, or they can decide to launch an imperfect product because they know they will launch the next iteration in 1 year anyway. Smaller companies will have greater time-to-market (TTM) pressures and may struggle more.

Let's assume that you cannot change the pace of innovation at your company. Step back and think about - What problem are you trying to solve? What is the minimum viable / lovable product? See if that helps to descope the nature of innovation needed.

Example - Today, my fitness tracker can measure EKG but the very first versions simply showed me a step-count. Both were considered ground breaking innovations at the time they were launched. But contextualizing those with respect to customer problems, can help with the cost and time pressures.