The Importance of Incremental innovation

A recent academic research paper, The Curse of the First Mover; When Incremental Innovation Leads to Radical Change, argues that incremental technological innovations can sometimes have more influence than radical ones.

The paper defines incremental innovation as "refinements and extensions of established designs that result in substantial price or functional benefits to users."  The paper uses case studies from Apple and Google to illustrate their point.  Key quote on Google:

"Google...has never produced any radical innovation, but owes its success to incremental improvement of existing products (search engines, web mail, maps, etc.). 

Our research on small business innovation shows that many small businesses are continuous incremental innovators.  It has been suggested to us that incremental innovation is not "real" innovation and because of this most small businesses do not innovate.

We disagree and believe incremental innovation is extremely important.  It is nice to be able to point to academic researchers who agree. 

Comments

[Stephanie Valentine]

Nice point. Being the incremental innovator has a lot of advantages over being the radical change agent on the bleeding edge, who rarely reaps anything close to the full reward for the innovation. Incremental innovators take stable products and services and present them in a unique way that appeals to customers. You could say they create profit in a market where not much profit existed, say in a commoditized market. Dell computer has been a good example of that in the past. Incremental innovators leverage the power of previous radical innovations to skim the cream off the top. A very nice niche if you can get it!

[Thierry Rayna]

Hi there, I am glad you found our article interesting. I fully support you point that small businesses are often considered as non innovative because they only innovate incrementally, which, as history proves is often more important than innovating radically. I think where it sometimes gets even worse is that many small businesses innovate radically but are not able to reap the benefits of their innovation because of incremental innovation of a later entrant (usually much larger) that takes over the whole market. Hence the belief that small businesses are non innovative while large ones are!

We have written a follow up of the "Curse of the first mover" article, entitled "Crossing the Chasm or being crossed out: the case of digital audio players", that focuses on this issue. Namely why Archos, a small French business that has always been months (or even years) ahead of Apple never managed to make it big.

The article can be downloaded there:
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1392691
(free registration is required to download)

Best regards,

Thierry

[Steve]

Stephanie: You are right - being a radical change agent is hard and failure rates are high.

Thierry: Thanks for the pointer to your new article.

Steve

[Sujit Sumitran]

Why the either-or approach? isn't everything contextual? The danger of incremental stuff in many cases is that the consumer hardly even notices the "innovation". And a radical approach to innovation, if based on market back insights, can ensure good strike rates!
- Sujit

http://firefighterorfirestarter.com
www.erehwonfirestarter.com

[Air Yeezy]

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[Impotence causes]

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[email archiving]

The only innovation I can think of google has on its gmail is its improve security and better interface thanks to google plus.