4 - What Makes Some Innovations More Challenging Still?

Summary

In this chapter, we are going to look at different forms of innovation, but not along the typical axes of difference. In the previous three chapters, we have distinguished between innovation in products and services, processes, and organizational practices, and between innovations that are mostly exploitative and incremental and those that are explorative and radical. The ones we will cover in this chapter are characterized by additional, complicating features that lead them to have different opportunities for new entrants, different challenges for incumbents, and different effects on industries. These features include particular aspects of marketing, organization, and uncertainty. We are going to close the chapter by taking a slightly different angle on the relationship between technology and industries. Where we have so far taken that relationship as given, we are going to look at how technologies that are potentially general in nature get applied to several different industries through a process of opportunity discovery that can in no reasonable way be taken for granted and what that might imply for technological improvement.