Innovation: Businesses Begin to Value Radical Innovation over Incremental, but the Execution isn’t there yet

Many business leaders today will agree that the long term success of their businesses is dependent on innovation and the ability to generate new ideas.  In order to maintain a competitive edge, these leaders place great value on innovation.  Innovative products and technologies like the iPad, FaceBook and Twitter have transformed and created whole new product categories.  Innovations like these are considered to be ‘radical’ or ‘disruptive’.  Increasingly companies are looking to create more ‘radical innovations’ as opposed to ‘incremental innovations’.

John Timmerman, Gallup senior strategist for customer experience and innovation, observes that many businesses over the past thirty years have been able to become successful by focusing on ‘incremental innovation’ by delivering quality products at reasonable price points, applying techniques like six sigma and total quality management (TQM).  Timmerman said that “in the past, a hallmark of quality was a steady cadence of continuous improvement. While incremental improvement is still necessary, it isn’t sufficient to get businesses where they want to be, given the speed of change required for most organizations to stay competitive these days. The next domain of quality will be innovation, because market dominance now requires fast and transformational change.”

Innovation is hard.  The level of the leap required to follow through with radical innovations is typically much higher than what’s necessary for incremental innovation.  But the rewards of radical innovation can be high.

Nirav Shah, Tata Communications, wrote on GigaOm that “radical innovation has historically overcome barriers to scientific progress. For example, the discovery of pi as a numerical concept found application in mathematics, physics, signal and image processing, genomics and across domains… Today, the computing world stands at a point where ‘pi’-like innovations can unlock quantum value…  Indeed, the computing world needs “pi”-like innovations that can anticipate and personalize use cases, find insights in terabytes of unrelated data, compute and store infinite data sets, create resilient intelligent networks, and self-healing security systems. A “pi” that can inspire imaginations and not only solve hitherto unsolved problems, but can transcend the digital ecosystems to solve problems we have not yet thought of and change the world.”