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Chapter 1. Introduction: The Dilemma of Inventions
features to existing solutions. Quickly placed improvements prove or disprove their
value within a clearly defined process and time-horizon. Development is directed
along a familiar and reassuring process. Examples for incremental innovation are
industrial products that ’improve’ from one year to another. A car that is sold
today will be significantly di erent from one sold 30 years ago: It may have power
steering, anti-lock brakes, airbags and air conditioning - but at the same time it is
recognizably the same kind of entity as its 30-year-old predecessor. The concept has
been refined and improved in steady, incremental stages.
For research, the more interesting and also more fascinating type of inventions are,
however, radical innovations. Radical innovations are di erent from incremental
innovations in nature: “Even though the radical innovation life cycle includes many
of the same sets of activities and decision points, the reality of managing the process
is strikingly di erent for radical versus incremental innovation.”
[
Leifer et al. 2000
]
.
Radical innovations either provide unprecedented performance features, or familiar
features that will enable market transformation through significant performance
improvements or cost reductions. They are not concerned with exploiting current
concepts, but with exploring entirely new ones. As such, the life-cycle of radical
innovations is highly uncertain and often unpredictable: It starts and stops, leads
to dead-ends and revives.
Radical innovation is often based on new technology and can in some instances
have a deep impact on established routines and practices. Often, radical innovation
inaugurates major technological systems that only later may stabilize and acquire
momentum. As an example, when the news about Edison’s successful presentation
of the light bulb in 1879 in front of 3000 sightseers traveled around the world,
Werner von Siemens only commented: ‘‘Deficiencies are certainly remaining and
it’s rather a set of modifications of known methods than an ingenious invention”.
So even Siemens being an expert and successful entrepreneur at those times was very
skeptical and mainly criticizing immediate implementation issues of a technical kind
instead of envisioning more long-term consequences. However, this seems to be a
common pattern since there were other comments as ‘‘for private flats gaslight will
remain the most comfortable and cheapest way of illumination. Electrical light may
be used in single larger rooms or luxurious flats, but this will be such an exception,
that it does not seem necessary to take it into account”. In 1880 Edison opened
the first light bulb factory, two years later the first power plant. Similar retentions
applied for Bell’s telephone, the Wright brothers’ airplane, Frank Whittle’s jet engine
and Marconi’s wireless telegraph.
Usually, radical innovations are developed, refined and realized by many and often
di erent parties. Only the cooperation with partners allowed to subsequently turn
ideas into the great innovations that still remain today. Because radical inventions
do not contribute to the growth of existing technological systems and may not yet fit
into established way of thinking (why should a light bulb replace a gas lamp which
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