I am pleased to say that Roberto Verganti and I have just completed
our paper "Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus
Technology and Meaning Change." This is the written version of the
talk we gave in Milan in 2011. It is being submitted to Design issues
along with a number of other papers based on talks from that
conference. I can mail a PDF of the paper to anyone who is
interested. The paper, of course, is likely to be revised following
editorial review. It might even get rejected. (Mail me at [log in to unmask])
INCREMENTAL AND RADICAL INNOVATION: DESIGN RESEARCH VERSUS TECHNOLOGY
AND MEANING CHANGE
Donald A. Norman* and Roberto Verganti**
* Nielsen Norman Group
** Politecnico di Milano and Mälardalen University
ABSTRACT
We discuss the differences between incremental and radical innovation
and argue that each results from different processes. We present
several methods of viewing incremental and radical innovation. One is
by examining the quality of product space, envisioning each product
opportunity as a hill in that space where the higher one is, the
better. Under this view, human-centered design methods are a form of
hill climbing, extremely well suited for continuous incremental
improvements but incapable of radical innovation. Radical innovation
requires finding a different hill, and this comes about only through
meaning or technology change. A second approach is to consider the
dimensions of meaning and technology change as two dimensions and
examining how products move through the resulting space. Finally, we
show how innovation might be viewed as lying in the space formed by
the dimension of research aimed at enhancing general knowledge and the
dimension of application to practice.
We conclude that human-centered design, with its emphasis on iterated
observation, ideation, and testing is ideally suited for incremental
innovation and unlikely to lead to radical innovation. Radical
innovation comes from changes in either technology or meaning.
Technology-driven innovation often comes from inventors and tinkerers.
Meaning-driven innovation, however, has the potential to be driven
through design research, but only if the research addresses
fundamental questions of new meanings and their interpretation.
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