Radical innovation: Fallacy or Verity
Pursuit of Radical Innovation | The Beauty of Incremental Innovation
In my experience of working over the years as a Strategy Consultant with various businesses across the spectrum, innovation has been (is) a constant theme. A lot of times the discussion has swirled towards categorising innovation and its impact on businesses. By way of this essay, I am contextualising the discussions through two key questions:
- What can be construed as innovation?
- What is a better approach to innovation — Incremental or Radical?
(I have shared my perspectives on Value Innovation and Innovation under Constraints in the past.)
When you look at a breakthrough product or a service, such as Apple iPhone or Google Search; it completely distorts the meaning of innovation. The sheer mindshare which these companies capture, is mind-blowing and gets often trumpeted across boardrooms and conferences, as the benchmark of any innovation initiative.
So, what does innovation really mean? Innovation can be defined as the process of translating an idea or invention into a product or service that creates value or for which customers will pay.
Is mobile phone an invention or an innovation?
Invention and innovation are often used in interchangeable ways\. To set the context, the invention is the act of discovering or creating something new, whereas innovation is the act of building upon it. The creation of the telephone was an invention, but the mobile phone is an innovation.
What is ‘Radical Innovation?’ As you can observe from the definition of innovation, it is a process of building upon the existing and in essence, it is incremental in nature. But when there is a leap in the incremental steps, it is defined as radical innovation.
Pursuit of Radical Innovation
How does radical innovation play out in an organisational context? When leadership demands creativity or innovation. The message (many times) which gets percolated down the hierarchy is that there is a need to come up with something radical or disruptive.
Let’s not forget, it is a reality that radical innovation outshines everything else. But it is detrimental for an organization to always be in the pursuit of radical innovation. It can indeed be dangerous, as this pursuit is resource-intensive and essentially a big gamble.
The Beauty of Incremental Innovation
As described earlier, innovation doesn’t always need to take big leaps forward. A more step-by-step (incremental) innovation is innovation too and makes the business more sustainable. I am nowhere disregarding the need for radical innovation, but I am making the case for incremental innovation to be a part of the larger strategy, if not more but as much as radical innovation.
This is a preferred approach when it comes to planting the seeds of an innovation culture within an organization. The push for a stream of smaller, incremental innovations eventually morphs into radical innovation over a period of time.
A case in point is the evolution of the automobile industry. The definition of how the car looks has not changed fundamentally, but if you look under the hood, it has undergone a massive transformation. This transformation has not happened overnight but has been a result of multiple incremental innovations over the decades.
Telemedicine at the frontline
If you look at the current crisis from a healthcare perspective, telemedicine is at the frontline in India and the world. We already had all the necessary parts of the ecosystem in place, be it digital connectivity which connects patients and doctors, technology solutions enabling the ecosystem and draft guidelines from a policy standpoint.
The lockdown became the tipping point in the technology adoption, both by the doctors and patients, along with approvals from the Health Ministry, made telemedicine the default way of providing care at present and possibly in the future.
To sum up
The COVID crisis as a whole has flipped the business-as-usual model across the board and is making organizations go virtual and digital-centric, with multiple incremental innovations. Thus, setting the stage for a radical transformation in the future.
The need of the hour is to think of innovation as occurring in a set of small innovative steps over time, which hopefully can converge into radical innovation. This also improves the efficacy of the innovation culture taking roots across the organization and not restricting to a particular department.
I would sum up by quoting Matt Ridley from the book, How Innovation Works
Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways or rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance — and that happen to be useful.
What is your take on incremental versus radical innovation? Would love to know your thoughts.
Until next time!
~ Sajid
Further reading
