Perspective # 1 : Disruptive Innovation vs. Incremental Innovation

Disruptive Innovation vs. Incremental Innovation: Many organizations are confused on the Innovation path to choose. The Japanese Kaizen incremental innovation path or the breakthrough or disruptive innovation path.

Also confusing is “is this idea incremental one or breakthrough?” (one man’s percieved incremental poison is another’s breakthrough nectar!)

Western innovation literature has always promoted radical, game changing, breakthrough or disruptive thinking and this was primarily led by Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen. We all have seen how disruptive innovations like digital photography or CDs changed our lifestyles. The best example of course is how automobiles killed horses as the transport medium.

Rhetoric from gurus like Gary Hamel who said, “As change becomes ever less predictable, companies will pay an ever-escalating price for their lopsided love of incrementalism.”, or the famous Nicholas Negroponte quote “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”, can confuse many of us about the worth of small incremental ideas.

But if you look at successful Japanese companies like Canon or Toyota one can see the power of incremental ideas snowballing into a powerful force of change. Yuzo Yazuda’s seminal book ’40 Years, 20 Million Ideas’ portrays how Toyota gets and manages a million ideas from its employees and has been doing it for more than a decade!!

Robinson and Schroeder in their classic ‘Ideas are free’ passionately make the case for small ideas. . “Business leaders are always looking for the next breakthrough idea – the ‘home run” that will put them well ahead of competition with one swing. The bigger the idea the more likely it is that competitors will discover and counter it. Small ideas on the other hand, are much less likely to migrate to competitors. They are often site and situation specific, and therefore of little use outside the company anyway”. They argue that going after small ideas is often the most productive, because not only are small ideas the best source of big ideas, but small ideas are often situation-specific which means they often remain proprietary to the company adopting them. And adopting even small changes can lead to new understanding to help the business or can lead to unanticipated, positive results.

Well! The message is clear – Go for both.