How can you distinguish incremental from radical innovation in product development?

I’ve noticed that radical innovation often combines insights across sectors or fields of knowledge. The current focus on having a career that spans a single field reduces the potential for new cross field relationships and thus new innovations and perspective. We should strive to know professional talent across sectors to learn faster and create novel products.

innovation whether radical or incremental builds on the strength of the ideas contributed. An incremental based innovation may be scaled up to radical if its degree of novelty changes and the impact in the market becomes enormous. Radical innovation creates a shift in the market.

Over the years, I've observed a recurring issue in traditional sectors: lack of innovation and optimization. This deficiency often manifests in our day-to-day tasks, where we tend to adopt new technologies. However, my product concept revolves around identifying the root causes and pinpointing where we're making mistakes that accumulate substantial innovation deficits. Goal is to streamline processes & implement small architectural changes to enhance efficiency. To accomplish, we must draw inspiration from various sources and leverage insights to our system design, processes, and the creation of small-scale solutions. By doing so, we can distinguish our current practices, ultimately driving improved (ROI) across the entire organization.

This an interesting point. In Iansiti and Lakhani’s book “Competing in the Age of AI”, it is argued that AI meets this criteria since in traditional organizations innovation often creates complexity and thus risk. AI on the other hand is radically different and creates more opportunity even as it becomes more complex. Radical innovation seems to paradoxically create opportunities for the new sectors it creates yet risk for traditional ones, although many traditional companies won’t notice they are under attack until too late.

Some companies have the role of product designer. These people are skilled in creating high fidelity prototypes fast and cheap, allowing teams to rapidly test ideas and iterate to actually find product market fit and message market fit before starting development. Such discovery processes are a prerequisite to bringing radical innovation, as the outcomes can simply not be thought up beforehand. Incremental innovation items can be gathered through customer feedback, or speaking with sales.

Radical innovation requires high levels of knowledge acquisition or Discovery to ask and then answer questions that haven't been previously thought of. With incremental innovation, many of the answers are already known and success of the project is predicated on effective task Execution. Understanding where the project falls on the continuum between discovery and execution is essential to applying the right project management techniques. Discovery or radical innovation tends to be complex and messy, often taking one step forward and two steps back until answers to critical questions are found. Progress on radical innovation is measured by what we've learned whereas for incremental it is what we've done.

It is missing a crucial aspect: the role of visionary leadership in connecting with the right ecosystem. It's not just about internal inspiration; it's about transforming that internal vision into a magnetic force that attracts stakeholders, skeptics, and partners. Radical innovation transcends the bounds of internal inspiration to engage with a broader ecosystem. Hence, the question is, does your vision breathe only within your organization, or does it come alive through an ecosystem that believes in you? True innovation goes beyond internal drivers—it thrives on a visionary approach that extends to a like-minded network.

Incremental innovation is making something that exist a little bit better with minimal cost investment and operational disruption. You'll recognize radical innovation because it is usually welcomed with a resounding "it's not going to work or is anybody else doing this?"

Well, that is certainly true of AI! Initially part of cog science, ups and downs from the 60s on. It is only now that it seems like magic but is built on decades of knowledge from science.

Sales teams often have trouble bringing radical innovations to market. Finding/developing radical innovations are just as difficult as bringing them to market. Product/strategy teams often overlook this non-trivial aspect. For incremental innovations, sales teams need a webinar or an explainer powerpoint deck. This will not work for radical innovations because sales teams see a bad ROI in spending time on them: - it often requires them to find new (stakeholders within) customers; - they're uncomfortable about their personal expertise on the novel product; and - the volumes often are lower than their existing business, so it will not help with their monthly/quarterly numbers.

It's also important to consider collaboration with the customer or end user. With incremental innovation, there are usually very good insights into the customers value expectation. But radical innovation requires far more collaboration with potential customers/users to ensure the new value creation resonates. Checking in at various points in development to ensure we are doing the right thing, doing the thing right and doing it all at the right time (when the market is poised to latch onto it) is critical to minimize development risk and validate work is proceeding on the right trajectory.

Maintaining a diversified project portfolio to balance your risk is critical to ensure both short and long term development funnel health. Radical innovation is inherently more risky and possibly lucrative. Incremental innovation has less uncertainty but less potential to drive growth. A diverse portfolio also helps your resources - constantly burdening people with challenging projects burns them out, giving them nothing but low level incremental work beats them with boredom.

Companies need both constant incremental and radical innovation, but it is important to give these tasks to the right employees: - Tasking an incremental innovator with radical innovation will burn them out. - Tasking a radical innovator with incremental innovation will bore them out. Incremental innovators are a very different breed than radical innovators. Radical innovators see incremental innovation as "just doing the work" and "developing the obvious next customer request", without risk and excitement. Incremental innovators pride themselves in carrying the company with their products' business and see radical innovation as building air castles. Both incremental and radical innovators can be entrepreneurial and come in all ages.