Hamel on Innovation

Gary Hamel has authored many useful concepts in the field of innovation and managerial innovation. Of interest is his view of incremental innovation and radical innovation. In simple terms, it means that when innovation is carried out at an incremental level, it's only improving something that already exists.
     "We can broadly simplify innovations into two kinds - incremental and radical. Incremental innovations are improvements to current products, methods, processes, services, partnehips and so on. Customer complaints and suggestions are a good source of ideas for iincremental improvements." (CHRISTENSSEN, apud SLOANE, Paul, 2007)
You can use a number of ways to improve what you currently have at your disposal. There are a number of tools to accomplish this, such as Kaizen, 6-Sigma, DMAIC Lean Manufacturing etc. You can keep streamlining processes all you like and you will always find room for improvement and therefore will keep making progress in areas that are still remain the same, only better over time.
     "However companies are poor at being different. It's difficult for companies to develop disruptive innovations that would threaten the basis of their success. Often they are put out of business when some smaller company develops a radically new technology. Which employee working in a booming telecoms company in the 1990s would be have suugested that free voice-over internet telephony would be something they should develop? It took a start-up, Skype, to bring this radical idea to the market." (HAMEL, Gary, apud SLOANE, Paul, 2007).
As posited above, playing it safe can only take you so far. You can do fairly well by remaining true to your risk-averse nature and refusing to make the leap from mediocre to something  that truly causes an impact on people's lives. But on the long term, there may come someone with a business proposal that will leave you high and dry in the ruthlessness of the market. Taking innovation a step further means not only working on your current resources, but to create somethingg new that will come in handy to double as other people's reosource.

radical	non-linear innovation	business concept improvement
incremental	continuous improvement	Business Concept Improvement
	Component	System

Hamel's incremental/radical Innovation Matrix



References:

SLOANE, Paul. The Innovative Leader: How to inspire your team and drive creativity. London: Kogan Page, 2007.

DENNING, Steve. Gary Hamel on Innovating Innovation <http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/12/04/gary-hamel-on-innovating-innovation/> Retrieved 3/11/2015.

MEYER, J.D. Management is at the Top of the Innovation Stack <http://sourcesofinsight.com/innovation-stack-management-innovation-is-at-the-top-of-the-pyramid/> Retrieved 3/11/2015.