A QUANTUM LEAP? THE CASE FOR RADICAL INNOVATION

Abstract

Incremental innovation has become the norm as the influence of business and management disciplines and functions have come to dominate research and practice—for example, standard processes for product development, design-thinking to improve existing user practices and superficial business model variations. Such incremental approaches to managing innovation have merit, and can result in significant cumulative changes over time. However, the way in which such incremental innovation is resourced, organised and managed is fundamentally different to that for radical innovation, which is critical to address more significant commercial and social challenges. The cases of new product development (NPD) and business model innovation (BMI) are examined to identify the challenges researchers and managers face. We argue that to acquire a deeper understanding of how radical innovation works, more ambitious cross-disciplinary research is needed, rather than the current direction of travel in the literature towards single discipline studies and standard processes that apply primarily to incremental commercial innovations.