Incremental Innovations...

Compared to Radical and Disruptive Types

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.” — Charles Kettering

Creativity and innovation drive impressive, on-going progress and quality of life on earth. They have done this throughout history. Creativity is the process called “ideation”—coming up with novel and useful ideas—while innovation takes those ideas and then applies, implements, or commercializes them in ways that make a small-to-big difference.

As Thomas Edison once said, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” Well-known business author and speaker Tom Peters advised us, “Swipe from the best, then adapt.” Improve upon what you’ve learned. That would make innovation easier, faster and more impactful. This article will mainly focus on one category of innovation — incremental — while touching on the other two — disruptive and radical for comparison.

 Great Value Incurred by Innovating

All forms and degrees of creativity and innovation (“mild-to wild”) are important, valuable, and sometimes vital for individuals (in their careers and lives) and organizations. Here are some of their accumulated benefits to businesses and organizations of all types:

-     Boosts your top-line revenues and bottom-line profits.

-     Gives your company a competitive edge, maybe a significant one.

-     Helps you grab marketshare and secures a dominant industry position.

-     Allows you to take advantage of new technologies and scientific discoveries.

-     Attracts top employee talent and leaders into your company.

-     Promotes long term growth, security, sustainability, and prosperity.

-     Improves your organization’s brand, image, and reputation.

-     Helps to engage and motivate workers and managers to peak performance.

-     Improves and strengthens customer satisfaction and loyalty.

-     Creates a more exciting, adventurous, and rewarding work environment and culture in your organization.

-     Promotes a sense of greater pride and achievement as a result of successful projects and breakthroughs.

-     Enables leaders to get needed capital and resources more easily compared to other companies not innovating as much.

 Most Innovations Are the Less Spectacular Types

Innovations get lots of headlines, admiration, and applause when they become groundbreaking spectacles. Who isn’t impressed with over-the-top breakthroughs in technologies, science, products, services, processes, and business models? More often than not though, innovations and changes within industries and markets result from steady, consistent, gradual, cautious and smaller steps forward on a continuous basis. These are incremental innovations. Implemented in the right ways, lots of these minor, iterative improvements will change the trajectory, growth, and impact of your business. 

Definition: Incremental innovation is defined as the progressive improvement and upgrading of existing products, services, processes, systems, procedures and business models within a company or organization. It’s making them better in some way — less costly, more reliable, durable, flexible, efficient, with added features, higher quality and boosted performance and functionality. These enhancements and minor innovations become more useful and valuable for one’s business and its customers and other stakeholders.

Incremental innovation is typically driven by a need to be more competitive in the market, improve customers’ satisfaction and experience, enhance revenues and profits, and effectively and efficiently adapt to changing customer preferences and needs. This enables organizations to evolve their products and services, make necessary steady and important advancements over time rather than attempting larger-scale, more risky and costly transformations. These smart organizations and businesses innovate to stay in the game and make a profit. They prefer to remain relevant and valuable, however, without trying to cause   an industry-wide stir using high-risk approaches.

Incremental innovation is simply about making small scale positive changes to add or keep the value and usefulness of existing products, services, and processes. This can be as basic as adding new, useful features to an existing product that amplifies its functionality. Or it can be more complex by developing an extended line of products, services, applications or technologies. Importantly, these minor innovations harness one’s existing infrastructure, technology, and business model so, it’s less demanding, quicker, and less taxing on resources to execute than trying to bring about a breakthrough, disruptive or radical innovation.

“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” —Roger von Oech

You’re likely familiar with the Japanese term and process called Kaizen, used extensively to eliminate waste, errors and to improve and maximize quality, productivity, and efficiency with workers, equipment, procedures, and processes, mostly in manufacturing. Toyota is famous for optimizing what is often called their "Kaizen Blitz.” Broadly speaking, the English translation for Kaizen is continuous improvement —with Kai meaning “change” and zen meaning “for the better.” Continuous improvement is often synonymous with incremental innovation.

The goals of Toyota’s Production System are to humanize the work environment, eliminate overly hard work, empower workers to identify many areas for improvement and then suggest practical solutions to apply and implement. It nurtures and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to effectively learn to spot and eliminate waste in the processes in which they’re involved.

 Most Prevalent and Popular Types of Innovations

According to various studies around 70 percent are incremental innovations depending upon the company or organization involved. Entrepreneur said it’s as high as 98 percent. The more risk averse an organization and its leaders are, the higher the percentage of these minor, but still useful innovation types. However, we seldom hear of these small improvements. In general, we love to see home runs, triples and even doubles hit in baseball games — or in business — but lots of single hits with “good pitching and defense” on a business team wins games.

Incremental innovations are the vital pillar behind the longevity of many of the oldest, most respected, and recognized brands in the world. It’s estimated that only 66 percent of businesses today make it to the two-year mark, and roughly 50 percent survive beyond five years. It takes a lot of work and creative smarts to overcome limitations, problems, competition, and setbacks. Here are just some companies that survived over a century and prospered mostly from incremental innovations: Toyota, Mercedes Benz, IBM, Caterpillar, John Deere, Coca-Cola, Goodyear, McDonalds, Oshkosh, Harley-Davidson, Gillette, Kraft Foods, UPS, L.L. Bean, Ford (and other American auto makers), Whirlpool, and Dupont.

Some of these companies have been in business for well over 100 years. The longevity of many of the oldest recognizable brands in the world benefitted from making those minor, steady improvements in existing products, services, processes, systems, equipment, machinery, and tools. That resulted in boosting and sharpening their productivity, efficiency, quality, and operating effectiveness.

Over time, these businesses improve their market position and build a bigger audience of consumers that gravitated to new and improved product features and performance, while in many cases keeping their prices stable or even lowering them because of slashed production and operating costs. Companies can then keep their products aligned, reinvigorated, and upgraded with current technology, burgeoning trends, and changing consumer needs within their markets.

Incremental innovation and continuous improvement may not have the bright, focused spotlight and publicity of its more daring and intrepid types of disruptive or radical innovations, but they are no less important. It’s ideal, though, for many organizations to have a well-thought-out mix of both incremental and more original and bodacious innovations that ensure both the short-and-long-term wellbeing, competitiveness, and prosperity of it. Managing and executing this spectrum or range of innovations requires methodical building from experience and employing different strategies, resources, policies, capabilities, and management structures that were used in the past.

Regardless of the innovation types chosen by your organization, you need to foster a dedicated open culture of innovation that encourages and promotes creativity, experimentation, deep learning collaboration, and prudent risk-taking. Companies should adopt a smart systematic, structured approach to innovation that identifies potential opportunities, generates ideas on a regular basis, evaluates and prioritizes options, implements solutions for problems, measures the success of outcomes and provides course corrections for the future. By doing these things, your organization can better leverage both bigger and smaller types of innovations to create maximum value for yourself, your customers and all your stakeholders.

 “Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth.”—Edith Widder

Unique Benefits of Incremental Innovations

 Those who choose to focus on the smaller types of innovations incur the following typical special series of benefits and advantages over more radical types:

-     Minimize risk in developing your improvement projects.

-     Ability to improve upon the core competencies and capabilities of current products and services.

-     Make it easier, quicker, and less costly to implement these innovations—a shorter development cycle.

-     Use safer and simpler technological upgrades from existing platforms, products, services, or processes.

-     Get faster reaction to customer recommendations and their changing needs and preferences.

-     Obtain a more predictable path and process regarding the activities and costs to innovate.

-     Use and capitalize on existing resources, processes, skills,  and knowledge.

Best Practices for Incremental Innovations

Organizations that master the art of innovation will methodically plan and execute the following practices, policies, and higher-level strategies and lower-level tactics:

Foster a culture rich in creativity and innovation.

This is the number one factor in beginning, accelerating, and sustaining continuous innovation in your organization. Numerous studies show that the right organizational culture will contribute about 80 percent of the success of innovations. A great culture is a petrie dish and idea/innovation factory of creativity and innovation.

Create a worthy vision with goals, objectives and plans.

Determining what exactly you want to accomplish in the near-to-long-term and how you will do that is paramount for success. There are many reasons why organizations innovate — to be more competitive, to improve its industry status and image, to get more customers, to lower costs, to boost revenues and profits and others. The key is to identify the most likely positive returns on your initial investments in innovation projects. Small successes will keep the innovation momentum growing into larger ones.

Hire and promote employees, managers, and leaders with a deep desire to innovate.

Middle managers, who embrace ideas and innovation from their employees are often the most responsible for getting improvements run through the corporate gauntlet. Higher level executives who are tasked and measured for the returns on innovation use it as one of their priority missions.

Employees at all levels need to be engaged in furthering innovation. It fosters ownership and empowerment and will produce a wider, more useful range of perspectives, insights, and solutions. Hire driven, smart people who love change, solving complex problems and innovating.

Provide excellent training and support.

Offer as much quality creativity and innovation training to all levels of employees. Equip them with concepts, processes, tools, and skills to generate superior ideas and ways to best implement or commercialize their best ideas. Focus on problem-solving and identifying opportunities to bring about new products, services, processes and improve current ones.

Celebrate and reward innovation successes.

The way to grease the skids to more creativity and innovation is to recognize and reward not just successes, but well-intentioned efforts that did not pan out. Publicize successes on your newsletters, web site and other forums. Have celebrations honoring the teams that were involved.

Encourage active cross-functional collaboration.

So many departments in organizations are silos and islands onto themselves. That limits vital exchange of information and ideas, that shared, could lead to better solutions and identifying opportunities to improve things Among departments. Collaboration and teaming from different areas will break down barriers and allow for a diverse range of expertise that fosters exploration of new possibilities.

Get customers and stakeholders involved.

Engage with customers through surveys, interviews, social media listening, and usability tests to fully understand their evolving needs, preferences, and pain points. Partners, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders will give you relevant input from their unique perspectives. Seek opinions and recommendations from just about anyone who is interested in sharing them. You want to make sure you have a powerful mix of information that will give you a competitive edge while ensuring your incremental innovations align with (and hopefully exceed) customer expectations. guide future iterations and help refine and sharpen your innovation strategy.

Continuously monitor, measure, and evaluate.

Effective innovation has no finish line. It’s continuous, and in many necessary cases, unrelenting. You want to know if your policies and practices are yielding the results you expect. So, collect and analyze meaningful data and metrics to accurately assess the effectiveness and ROI of implemented enhancements.

 Car Audio: Good Example of Incrementalism

Those of us who are “seasoned” folks - over 65+ years old will remember our cars and trucks from the 1960s to 1970s when your (AM and FM) radio typically had just 2 or 4 speakers giving us an acceptable, but one-dimensional sound quality. Then, in the interest of adding value via incremental innovation, auto manufacturers first added 8-track cartridges (that dates us. Yikes!), then cassette tapes, then DVDs (some with a multiple changer), then adding more speakers and higher-powered amplifiers with big bass speakers.

As time went on, audiophiles would choose to add even better custom aftermarket components to improve their in-car listening experience. Over the years, car companies steadily improved and upgraded their audio systems as incremental innovations. They added more and improved speakers, better amps and new functionality that brought forth a richer listening experience. This enabled car companies to better differentiate their vehicles and, hopefully, have an extra competitive edge in the market.

Fast forward to today, as car companies strive to seriously outdo each other in creating the ultimate concert hall realism with ear-splitting superb audio. Luxury car brands have collaborated with premier audio companies like Bose, Harman Kardon, Bowers and Wilkins, AKG, Bang and Olufsen and others to engineer factory installed spectacular sound systems (some costing over $10,000 as options) having 1,500+ watt amplifiers, 36 speakers with 28 channel audio, for example.

SiriusXM Satellite radio was another new feature. Wireless Apple Car Play for iPhones and Android phones brought yet new functionality to one’s vehicle. Audio purists are delighted with these combined upgrades brought about by incremental innovations, that added together, made a huge leap forward in audio quality excellence.

Comparison with Radical Innovations

 “I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” —Henry Ford

Breakthrough and quantum leap innovations create entirely new markets and disrupt existing industries with amazing things. They often change our lives permanently. In many cases, they catapult business users and consumers into a world filled with seemingly unlimited possibilities and opportunities using new rules and benchmarks. To be a true, certified card-carrying, move-the-needle innovator (and innovative leader) in your field, you must have your eye on the future and innovate (in all its forms) with that future in mind to make a new value network. You must rattle some cages and rock some boats to shake up the status quo and demolish mediocrity to replace, instead, it with a higher level of excellence.

Some examples of these major innovations from the 19th to the 21st century include the light bulb, phonograph, automobile, telephone, motion picture camera, AC power distribution, air conditioning, television, airplane, jet plane (and high bypass engines), lasers, DSLR and video cameras, computers (and their storage systems), cellular and smart phones, medical breakthroughs, the internet (with its commercialization), robotics, software applications (like desktop publishing and video editing), video on-demand streaming services, AI (Artificial Intelligence), blockchain, IoT (Internet of Things), electric cars, GPS, and many transformative others. 

In rare cases, a rather simple, but surprising innovation can have an amplified, widespread effect in many ways. That was the case when the modern safety pin was invented in 1849 by American mechanic Walter Hunt. It turned out to have hundreds, if not thousands, of valuable uses. In 1853, Elisha Graves Otis introduced the first safety passenger elevator at the Crystal Palace Convention in New York City. The first passenger elevator was installed in New York City in 1856. This radical, incredibly important innovation changed the lives of those living and working in taller buildings that later came on the scene. Imagine how elevators helped those who had to move items, especially bulky and heavy ones to higher floors in the building.

Over the next 167 years to today, elevators were incrementally innovated with automation, safety features, larger sizes, and better functionality, reliability, appearance, and performance. Today, the world’s fastest elevator is installed in the Shanghai Tower in China, the second tallest building in the world. It travels at a speedy 67 feet (20 meters) per second or 46 miles (74 kilometers) an hour and runs continuously through 1,898 (579 meters) of the skyscraper’s 2,073 feet (632 meters).  

Another major innovation, a somewhat “cousin of the elevator,” was the escalator. On March 15, 1892, Jesse Reno patented his moving stairs, or inclined elevator, as he called it. It was redesigned in 1897 by Charles Seeberger. He gave it the name escalator from scala, the Latin word for steps, and elevator a word for something already invented. Seeberger partnered with the Otis Elevator Co. to produce the first commercial escalator in 1899 at the Otis factory in Yonkers, New York. And follow-on incremental innovations over decades, especially the cleated, level steps of the modern escalator, made it the indispensable people transportation device what it is today.

When Adobe originally created Photoshop, a raster graphics editing program in 1987, it was a stunning radical innovation that seemed to be a magical digital palette of art and drawing tools and photo manipulation and enhancement to do the impossible with a computer. Over the years, Adobe added new features, improved its functionality and performance, and gave it access across platforms as it incrementally innovated this marvelous application.

All these breakthroughs have initially transformed how we lived and worked, while incremental innovations enhanced aspects of those products, services, systems, or processes. The greater the innovation, though, the higher the risk, cost and uncertainly of its outcome compared to incremental ones.

Big innovations explore new paths and domains and experiment with far-reaching, untested ideas, while minor innovations are worked on using a base of proven concepts, models, and best practices. Oftentimes, a radical or disruptive innovation combines the power of technology with a new business model like the iPod with iTunes or Uber with its accompanying phone app to schedule rides.

Extreme innovations can seriously challenge or annihilate the status quo and create necessary chaos to shake things up compared to the more mildly progressive, phased and “smoother” innovations that upgrade elements within the current situations and operating environments. Software updates are a prime example of the latter, while something like AI (Artificial Intelligence Applications) and advanced robots (like Tesla’s Optimus or Boston Dynamics’ Atlas) can change entire industries, companies and their workforces while opening vast new areas of uses, capabilities and efficiencies never before imagined or available.

Transformative and seemingly sudden innovations will erupt, upset and turn around the traditional or established way an industry operates, especially in a new, more effective and efficient way. Netflix with its video streaming capabilities is such an example of a disruptive innovation that put Blockbuster and the entire movie rental market out of business with a better, more convenient service.

Major innovations involve a long time and high cost to bring about. They typically incur lots of experimentation, prototyping, failures and setbacks, and interactive refining to make them mature and ready for commercialization. Sir James Dyson is a British inventor, entrepreneur, industrial designer, marketer, and founder of the Dyson company known for their game-changing appliances. This respected billionaire became famous for his novel bagless vacuum cleaner that redefined the internal mechanics and performance of that common household item.

As a lone innovator, though, it took Dyson working in his coach house on a farm in the Cotswolds, a mind-boggling 5,127 changes, tweaks and incremental modifications over five years (really 15 years from the time he came up with the idea) to get it just right to produce the DC01 — the first in the Dyson Dual Cyclone series of powerful and efficient vacuum cleaners that went to market in 1993.

 "The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, what the world needs most are dreamers that do.” —Sarah Ban Breathnach

 Innovation W-O-W Thing

One aspect of an ultra-radical innovation is something that has not been done before —something bigger-than-big and better-than-best and cooler-than-cool. That’s the mind-boggling $2.3 billion Las Vegas Sphere, an 17,500-seat music and entertainment amphitheater. It’s the city’s newest epic attraction and icon that will redefine and amplify Vegas’s uniqueness and architecture to surely draw even more visitors to “Sin City.” The colossal spherical building (world’s largest) with nine levels measures 366 feet (112 meters) high and 516 feet (157 meters) wide at its broadest point.

Hyperbole seems to justifiably lend itself into adjectives rarely used to describe this stunning, spectacular piece of one-of-a-kind design and engineering that brings traffic to a standstill once viewed. This is “Phantasmagoria Eye Candy” (inside and outside the Sphere) never seen or experienced before. On the exterior are 1.2 million ashtray-size LED screens beaming crystal-clear, color-saturated computer-generated images like rotating globes, spiraling geometric designs and other brilliant high-resolution images on its 580,000 square-foot surface. It’s so huge, bright and color-saturated, it can be seen from space.

The Sphere's interior includes the largest highest-resolution (16K wraparound) LED screen in the world measuring 160,000 square feet (15,000 square meters) along with earth-shaking immersive sound, that boasts 1,586 loudspeaker modules, 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers and processing channels and a total weight of 395,120 pounds.

From the beginning, sound engineers focused on radically transforming audio technology, rethinking the underlying physics of sound reproduction itself. Other exclusive immersion innovations include (haptic technology) vibrating seats and scent, temperature, and even wind technology to augment the amazing visual and audio experience. What a super-duper innovation!

 More About Disruptive and Radical Innovations

 “No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered.” – Winston Churchill

 In Clayton Christiansen’s popular book, Innovators Dilemma, he coined the term “Disruptive Innovation.” While he primarily focused on technologies and methodologies, significant breakthroughs in products, services, processes, and systems can also dramatically remake and shake up an existing market or industry, making current products, for example obsolete or relegated to small niche sales.

The momentous invention of the transistor in 1947, for example, began putting vacuum tubes out of date, although many guitar amplifiers today use tube amps because musicians prefer their warm, natural organic tone and dynamic response that adds richness and character to their sound compared to solid state amps. Those transistors were later innovated into massively packed integrated circuits, CPUs, and GPUs with millions, then billions of transistors on chips the size of your fingernail. First a radical innovation, then decades of valuable incremental innovations transformed the original invention of one transistor into tens of thousands of a wide variety of products only previously imagined.

Diesel-electric railroad locomotives were a disruptive innovation that began replacing steam engines in the 1940s, 50s and 60s due to several important positive operational and financial factors. Steam locomotives, themselves, were truly marvels of engineering and performance for their time. The biggest ones made (starting in 1941) for the Union Pacific Railroad were the massive, coal-fired “Big Boys” 132 feet (over 40 meters) long, with 14 wheels weighing 1.2 million pounds! Compare that with a powerful diesel locomotive “only” at 74 feet (23 meters) long.

Steam locomotives were very complex and costly machines to build, operate and service. Also, they were not fuel efficient. The average-size ones required water stops roughly every 50 miles (80 km) and had to stop about every 100 miles (160 km) for coal or oil for its steam boilers. The breakthrough innovation of diesels provided substantial savings in operation and maintenance.  They eliminated the widespread facilities and equipment needed for steam engine trains.

Diesel-electric locomotives have their engine connected to an electric generator. The resulting electricity then powers motors connected to the locomotive’s wheels. Compared to even the best steam locomotives of the 1930s and 40s, they were more fuel efficient, faster, more compact, lower weight, reliable and provided high torque at low speeds, which make them very suitable for heavy duty transportation applications.

These types of diesel locomotive trains can move extremely large and long loads weighing close to one hundred thousand tons and can extend to more than 4.5 miles (over 7 kilometers) in total length. Diesels require less employees to run, maintain and repair them. Over time, they were incrementally improved with the latest engineering, features and technology making them even better.

Two major companies with a long history of building these high-quality behemoths of pulling power diesel locomotives are GE and EMD (Electro-Motive Diesel), formerly a division of General Motors, now a subsidiary of Caterpillar.  GE's Evolution Series locomotives are known for their fuel efficiency and advanced technological features, while EMD's SD70 series locomotives are known for their power and reliability, though GE engines are extremely reliable as well. Steam locomotives, and the companies that produced them, finally fell out of complete favor in the mid-20th century with the final steam locomotive manufacturer, ALCO closing its doors prior to 1970. These nostalgic titans of transportation are still on display for those who admire and revere them for their historical and timeless beauty.

 Incremental Innovation Process

Having a defined process and strategy to drive continuous innovation is a valuable steppingstone to your organization’s continuous success and competitive advantage. Here are key steps in this process to get you started:

 Step 1: Determine your goals and create a plan.

What exactly do you want to accomplish, improve, or begin by using creative ideas that are applied to innovation efforts? How do you envision going about your innovation activities? Where and how should you start to build momentum and get good returns on your innovation programs? Some things to consider include:

-     Improve your organization’s branding, image, and reputation.

-     Identify priority efforts to improve specific products, services, processes, systems, or other areas of improvement.

-     Determine what characteristics and factors you want to improve such as reducing cost, eliminating waste, improving reliability and durability, adding new features, enhancing overall performance, making it easier to use or operate.

-     Add increased value to your business model to give you more of a competitive advantage.

-     Reshape and upgrade your organizational culture to make it more open, receptive, and supportive to creativity and innovation efforts.

 Step 2: What is your strategy to begin?

Your strategy is how you intend to meet your innovation goals and objectives—how best to proceed to minimize risks, keep costs in line, measure outcomes, motivate employees and get management fully behind innovation. Here are some things to consider:

-     Determine who should be involved in your incremental innovation programs. Who should lead it and garner support from decision-makers and stakeholders?

-     Create your process and timelines to reach each of your goals.

-     What activities should be your highest priority?

-     Determine what resources you will need to be successful.

-     What challenges might you face in moving ahead and how might you best deal with them?

 Step 3: Generate creative ideas.

-     Put together diverse teams (with different skills, talents, experiences, thinking styles, job types) to brainstorm ideas for innovations and enhancements.

-     Develop a large pool of unique ideas to consider for each item you want to improve or create something new.

-     Encourage expansive 360 degree thinking and do not censor any ideas at this point.

 Step 4: Select the best ideas based upon your chosen needs, and benchmarks.

-     Determine your judging criteria for ideas in terms of feasibility, cost, potential impact, alignment with your organizational goals, resources, estimated timelines to achieve results, and other key factors.

-     Use a rating system, have people score ideas and then prioritize them in the top 2-3 categories.

-     Chose the most promising “practical” and likely ideal ideas for further development.

 Step 5: Development, application or implementation, and testing.

-     Develop the ideas or concepts for products, services, process, system or others into models and prototypes.

-     Test and evaluate ideas to assess and score their intended functionality, introduction of new features, performance, and user experiences.

-     Collect, analyze, and document customer or other user feedback from structured trials.      

Step 6: Perform corrections, refinements, and improvements.

-     After getting feedback, your prototypes for innovation go through iterative refinement cycles where you look to improve as many areas as possible of its design, operation, reliability, performance and intended user experience.

-     Address all issues that you found and keep on upgrading or improving until your degree of enhancement and excellence is achieved.

 Step 7: Implement the innovations and improvements.

-     Once the solution, concept, or prototype of the service, product, equipment, machinery, tools, process, procedure, system, or technology, for example, has met the required standards, you then ready it for application, implementation, or commercialization.

-     All the incremental upgrades and improvements are integrated into the final phase of innovation. This may require close collaboration with several departments such as design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, legal, operations and distribution.

 Step 8: Perform widespread launch and evaluation  of its success.

-      The product, service or technology is launched in the market and the internally innovated process or system is implemented in the organization as part of operations.

-      The performance and impact are closely monitored, measured, and evaluated against predetermined goals, objectives, and metrics.

-      Feedback (information and data) from customers, users, employees and other involved and interested stakeholders is continuously collected to identify future enhancements and changes.

 Step 9: On-going feedback and iterative improvements

-      Incremental innovation continues with new feedback from users, customers, and other stakeholders to drive further upgrades and enhancements.

-      Monitor competitors for their incremental upgrades on their offerings and operations to gain new, useful ideas to possibly use.

-      Steadily monitor market and industry trends and engage in frequent customer feedback loops to find new areas for yet further improvements or additions that will sustain value-added incremental innovations.

 Summary

Incremental innovations are more about evolutionary improvements while disruptive, and, especially, radical (“quantum leap”) innovations are about revolutionary changes that have a huge effect upon our work, personal, and social lives. These breakthrough, over-the-top innovations in their scope and impact transform how we do business. They reshape, rebuild, or create entirely new markets and industries. They are far beyond the effects of small innovations.

Yet, it’s smart, practical, and truly valuable to start your innovation journey or to continue it by focusing on as many incremental improvements and upgrades as possible before you attempt to go to the next levels of higher innovation. When your learning curve blossoms and accelerates and your appetite for more complex, riskier innovations beckon you to step forward in that direction, you’ll hopefully find greater, more impressive returns on your investment in both the short-and-long term.

It all begins with an imaginative idea, “To be original is to be brave enough to express yourself.” As marketing and business expert Steven Jeffes notes, “Innovation is the unrelenting drive to break the status quo and develop anew where few have dared to go.” Dare yourself to take and stay on the path of innovation that leads to exciting destinations for yourself and your organization!

About the Author

Ray Anthony is the Chief “Innovader” in The Woodlands, Texas, USA. He is the author of 9 books and over 100 articles on organizational change, innovation, leadership, creativity, sales, presentation skills and other strategic business topics. His vanguard book, Innovative Presentations for Dummies (Wiley Publishing) shows how to powerfully reimagine, reinvent, and remake presentations that win against the toughest odds. Ray is a successful, dynamic keynote speaker, executive coach, program developer, corporate trainer, videographer and creative who has worked with numerous Fortune 500 corporations and elite U.S. government agencies (CIA, NASA and USSOCOM) to help improve their operational performance and results through creativity and innovation. He can be reached at Innovader@comcast.net or cell: 832-594-4747.