Innovation nowadays is often seen as radical. For example Tesla, everybody knows Tesla from their fancy electric cars. Tesla, however, is not just a car builder. It is a company that wants to build at a sustainable environment. The company is now producing batteries for at home to maximize the electricity used from solar energy. The battery stores energy during daytime when the sun is shining and uses it when charging the car in the evenings. It can even be used as a backup generator incase when there is a power outage. These are all radical innovation products, but what about incremental innovation?
Some infrastructures are simply not able to innovate radically. Let’s take the electricity grid. This is an infrastructure with huge entry costs. Radical innovation is simply not possible due to the high costs of such a network. The only way to innovate is incrementally. Continuously improving small parts of the network. For example the Wintrack. It is a new design for high voltage powerlines, minimalizing magnetic fields created by those high voltage powerlines.
Though incremental innovation is a more common way of innovating, you only hear about the radical innovations. But where is the line drawn? Shouldn’t all innovations start as a radical innovation and continue incremental? Take for example the Iphone, when the Iphone was launched it was the radical innovation of the century. With every new Iphone people still think its radical innovation, but isn’t this more an incremental process? Improving the product over time? Where is the line drawn?
To make clear what kind of innovation a product is, Abernathy and Clark defined a taxonomy for innovation. In this taxonomy innovation is classified along two axes. On the vertical axis is about whether the innovation is based on existing or new knowledge. The horizontal axis defines whether the innovation is for current users or for new users. This taxonomy then has four quadrants. When there is an existing knowledge and an existing market it’s called regular innovation. The phone innovation fits in this quadrant. Innovations with existing knowledge and a new market are classified as niche innovation. Revolutionary innovation is when an existing market is combined with new knowledge. Electrical cars fit in this quadrant. While the car market exists already for a while, the electric car is a revolutionary design using new knowledge. Finally when innovations combine new knowledge with new markets it is defined as architectural innovation. Examples are fertilizers and agricultural mechanization.
Even though you often read about radical innovations from phone companies. This while no new market is created and existing knowledge is used. Of course some new features are added to the phone but that does not make it radical.
The only real forms of radical innovation are revolutionary and architectural innovation when new knowledge is used developing a new product. Still responsible innovation does not need radical innovation to be innovative. Apple shows that with existing knowledge responsible innovation is possible.