Incremental vs Radical Innovation

Two forms of product innovation relevant to design:

Incremental innovation

• Improving/enhancing existing products. Most common, less glamorous, lower risk.
• This is what human-centered design techniques are suited for — observation, iteration, hill-climbing on known products. HCD cannot, by itself, lead to radical innovation.
• Driven by enhancing existing goals; the natural home of Featuritis and Creeping Featurism if undisciplined.

Radical innovation

• A new paradigm / new product category, often technology-driven. Most glamorous, but rarely successful — most radical innovations fail.
• Arises by reconsidering the goals — root cause analysis, asking what the real goal is (see Root Cause Analysis and the Five Whys). "Everyone wants radical innovation, but most fail."

The long timeline (a core ch.7 claim)

• Technology changes fast; people and culture change slowly. Going from invention to product can take months; product to acceptance takes years, decades, sometimes centuries.
• "Stigler's Law": credit attaches to whoever capitalized on an idea, not whoever originated it. In products, the idea is the easy part; producing a successful product is the hard part.
• Large companies are conservative and intolerant of failure; small companies take the radical risks (most fail — failure is a "badge of honor" in startup culture). See "Cases: How Long Innovation Really Takes" (multitouch took ~30 yrs; videophone 130+; HDTV ~35).
• "Rise of the small": cheap tools / 3-D printing / DIY makers increasingly let small players conceive and introduce ideas.

Confidence

1.0 — explicit chapter distinction.

Sources: ["DOET ch.7 'Two Forms of Innovation' p.279+; 'How Long Does It Take' p.268-279"]