The Ultimate Guide to the Four Types of Innovation

Most of us harbor a deep, dark secret: we are not prophets. We are aware that no amount of divine intervention, psychedelics, or listing new uses for a paper clip will give us the ability to know everything about the future and continually guide us from one paradigm shifting revelation to another. Since we are mere mortals who can’t raise their hands to part the Red Sea or give birth to the iPod, we automatically assume that we are unimaginative and don’t have the X-factor that makes a select, holy few us innovators and the rest of us middle managers and analysts. While it is correct to assume that we are not prophets, it does not mean that the ability to innovate is a lost cause for those of us who do not harbor the belief that they have an ability to foretell and forecast as if they were a prophet.

Since we don’t have the ability to part the waters, we need the ability to build a bridge. Thankfully, innovation, like bridge building, is a both process and a puzzle that can be researched, measured, and managed. Over the past few decades, research conducted into innovation across a range of disciplines has shown that there are recurrent patterns in innovation and these patterns separate themselves into four different types of innovation: incremental, disruptive, architectural, and radical. Each of these innovations solve different problems depending on the…