Distinctions between Incremental Innovation vs. Disruptive Innovation

Distinctions between Incremental Innovation vs. Disruptive Innovation

This blog delineates the distinctions between incremental innovation and destructive innovation: what exactly are these types of innovation and how the lack of innovation can hurt an employee in a large company.  We will explore how company culture, competitors, and strategic alliances can play a more direct role in boosting or stagnating innovation and growth in a company that is entering its maturity phase.   Finally, this blog will offer some tips on how best to utilize innovation, depending on the corporate and social dynamics are present.

Innovation is vital to impact a company to maximize itself throughout its growth phase in its product life cycle (PLC).  Specifically, we will only be focused on the distinctions between incremental innovation and disruptive innovation.  These types of innovation is not necessarily a dichotomy in which we are forced to cultivate bias on one type or another.  Ultimately, these types of innovation overlap each other, but paradoxically there is room for distinction in which when we choose one type, we must temporarily miss out on more creative opportunities

Businessdictionary.com defines incremental innovation as: A series of small improvements to an existing product or product line that usually helps maintain or improve its competitive position over time. Incremental innovation is regularly used within the high technology business by companies that need to continue to improve their products to include new features increasingly desired by consumers.  This type of innovation is extremely popular and will continue to thrive throughout almost all types of industries since it relates to the concept of constant improvement, from Edwards Deming.

Incremental Innovation
Pros	Cons
Low risk	Low reward
Not the "creator of conflict"	Misses out on growth
Company achieves goals	Missing paradigm shifts
Focused on constant improvement paradigm	Carrying old methods

Disruptive innovation is defined on Wikipedia as:  that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology.  This blog will focus more on how to cultivate disruptive innovation and the costs of not applying this in our professional lives.

Disruptive Innovation
Pros	Cons
High reward	High risk (subjective)
Take over an industry offensively	Unanswered questions
Directing competition and industry dynamics	Reputation of lacking Visionary Leadership
Opportunity to cultivate a blue ocean strategy	Loss of opportunity to capture a blue ocean strategy

There are certainly some benefits with applying incremental innovation.  For example, if we are positioned in a company that favors “listening to your manager” and not “trying something new,” then we are best left with the possibility of applying incremental innovation at best.  The possibility of conflict making an appearance in your professional relationships between your boss and co-workers is always a factor to take in.  Some employees dislike avoiding conflict at their workplace at almost all costs, which can silently stagnate innovation.

For example, let’s analyze a large company from culture that is focused on incremental innovation, if any.  The company is extremely large and there is little room to get noticed from management.  The corporate culture is primarily about following your goals that are established by your manager.  Also, errors from the employee are noticed by management  and there is always high demand to take an immediate position in the company.  Employees in this type are mostly risk-averse to innovation.  If anything, they are more about just trying to “do his job” and follow policies in the company….(I will complete this soon!)