2.3 Incremental vs Radical Innovation
To summarize, incremental innovation compared to radical innovation:
Incremental innovation is based on iterative efforts to provide new benefits, features, and improvements to products in the existing market based on existing technologies (i.e. improvements within a given frame of solutions [X6]). Examples of incremental innovation are improvements of the fuel efficiency of the combustion engines in vehicles, or technological improvements that make it possible to extract oil whereas previously not possible.
The roots of radical innovation can be derived from Schumpeter [27] who proposes "creative destruction," where innovations destroy the market positions of businesses that commits and sticks to old technology. A radical innovation is in this paper seen as innovations based on new technology that through discontinuity results in a novel market infrastructure. One example is from the 1970s to the 1980s, when Facit, a global Swedish company offering office products such as typewriters and calculators…show more content… Innovations are disruptive to incumbents because they dramatically disrupt the current market compared to sustaining innovation that does not affect the market. One interesting point is that disruptive innovations per se. do not have to be disruptive, depending on the diffusion pattern of the new product [25]. Christensen et al. [5] thus sees disruptive innovation in the form of “Catalytic Innovation” to be a solution to problems that calls for a social change. The interesting thing with disruptive innovation is that like radical innovation it does not have to more or less totally eradicate other innovations, e.g. Amazon’s disruptive business model has not eradicated old-fashioned