Incremental Innovation

Over the past two decades, periodic strategic reviews have become a mainstay of U.S. national security policy making, as government officials have instituted quadrennial reviews at all of the major national security agencies. The outcomes of these reviews may influence whether or not the government is prepared for important challenges. Yet we have known little about whether quadrennial reviews lead the government to do anything differently. In this article I evaluate the outcomes of several quadrennial reviews by national security agencies, analyze the factors that have shaped their outcomes, and consider the value of formal strategic reviews more generally. I find that, in the absence of significant presidential involvement, quadrennial reviews rarely generate major strategy shifts or transformational reforms, but these reviews can help the leaders of agencies institutionalize their priorities by creating bureaucratic buy-in for incremental policy and organizational changes.

Over the past two decades, major strategic reviews have become a mainstay of U.S. national security policy making. In 1996, Congress mandated that the Defense Department conduct a Quadrennial Defense Review every four years. Since then, quadrennial reviews have also been instituted in the U.S. intelligence community and at the State Department and Homeland Security Department. The outcomes of these reviews, which typically involve many hundreds of government personnel in months of intensive bureaucratic activity, may influence whether or not the government is prepared for important challenges. Yet we know little about whether the reviews lead the government to do anything differently. In this paper I evaluate the impact of several quadrennial reviews by U.S. national security agencies, analyze the factors that have shaped and constrained their impact, and consider the value of formal strategic reviews more generally. I find that, in the absence of significant presidential involvement, formal reviews rarely generate major strategy shifts, but these reviews are not generally a waste of time. Their principal effect on government activity is to help the leaders of agencies institutionalize their priorities by creating bureaucratic buy-in for incremental policy and organizational changes.

Incremental improvement of a deeply embedded technology system has been a hallmark of the automotive industry for a very long time. Efforts to develop alternatives have repeatedly failed. This paper analyses how Toyota started to challenge this pattern in the late 1990s, by the architectural innovation embodied in Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid-electric car.

The preferences of customers are rapidly changing with the changes in trends. Similar situation is also faced by restaurant sector which forces them to stay in the process of adaptation in relation with the changes in customers’ demands and needs. Some of the challenges which the restaurant sector is facing are; customers’ preferences over healthier food, advancement in technology over delivery of food and dining experience, new entrants, environmental sustainability, marketing strategies, heightened expectations of customers and food processing methods. The businesses can cope up with these challenges through innovation, which is a tool that can provide competitive advantage in order to survive in the rapidly changing and cutthroat environment. This report will elaborate the notions "Innovation" and "Commercialization" in depth which can be beneficial for entrepreneurs to boost their businesses.

This study aimed to examine the relationship between technological capabilities and Organizational innovation (incremental and radical) in the services sector in Sudan. The study used the quantitative method via convenience sampling; the population was the 170 managers of the service firms, response rate of 96%. The result of this study shows that there is a positive relationship between technological capabilities and incremental innovation, as well as a positive relationship between technological capabilities and radical innovation. The study recommended that future researches should test (e.g. manufacturing) and explain how to expand the scope of technological capabilities. The study also recommended Future researches may include firms from other industries or regions to generalize the findings. It would provide valuable information for managers regarding the mapping of technological capabilities with organizational innovation

RESUMEN
El concepto de desarrollo económico ha estado ligado al cambio en cuanto a mejora de los procesos y productos, que se traduzcan en un impacto positivo de los resultados. En cierta forma, es una manera de concebir la innovación. A pesar de que este concepto nace y evoluciona principalmente para el sector manufacturero, ha llegado a ser aplicado a los servicios, donde los hoteles forman un grupo importante. En éstos, priman las particularidades de sus actividades para efectos de considerar la gestión de la innovación. Los estudios aquí analizados hacen énfasis en el papel del capital humano, el ambiente empresarial, el efecto del tamaño del hotel, la orientación al cliente, entre otros aspectos. Se concluye en ellos también un mayor énfasis en la innovación incremental (mejora en los servicios y procesos existentes) que en la innovación radical (la creación de nuevos servicios), así como en la adquisición de tecnología externa para innovar, por encima de la creación interna de procesos de innovación, reflejado en la baja inversión en Investigación y Desarrollo (I+D).

Abstract
The concept of economic development has been linked to the change in terms of improving processes and products, which result in a positive impact on the results. Somewhat, it’s a way of thinking about innovation. Although this concept is born and evolves mainly for the manufacturing sector, has come to be applied to services, where hotels are an important group. In these, it is important to prioritize the particularities of their activities for the purpose of considering the management of innovation. The studies reviewed here emphasize the role of human capital, business environment, the effect of the size of the hotel, customer orientation, among others. We conclude in them also there is a greater emphasis on incremental innovation (improvement in services and processes) that radical innovation (creating new services), as well as the acquisition of external technology to innovate above internal creation of innovation processes, reflected in the low investment in research and development -R & D-.

This chapter explores the increasingly challenging activity of predicting technological innovations in Internet applications and services. It introduces the concepts of incremental and disruptive innovations and illustrates how waves of technological innovations emerge as a consequence of their interaction. We describe selected future prediction methods and outline their limits when faced with the accelerating occurrence of disruptive innovations in the Internet business. Their potential to induce behavioral changes in the individual use of a technology may ultimately lead to its adoption on a societal level and thus may change entire markets. Three case studies describe how incremental and disruptive innovations gave rise to waves of innovations in the fields of mobile handset markets, online shopping, and the computing industry at large. We conclude that a “user-pull” approach, in which the needs of potential and actual technology users serve as the primary basis to develop predictions of technology innovation may lead to better and more robust results. However, social media provide a world-wide platform of an immediately accessible mass market, making potentially disruptive innovations harder to predict as the diffusion of such innovations can happen now at an unprecedented speed, and consequently the prediction horizon for companies competing in the related markets becomes more unstable and ever shorter.

Technological innovation is when inventions of new things and/or new ways of doing things are transformed into usable devices and applications to enable organizations and/or adopters to take advantage
of important opportunities, to cope with problems or environmental threats. Technological innovation is an element of the complex system of technology directed to satisfy needs, achieve goals, and solve problems of adopters. The origin and diffusion of technological innovation are main characteristics of the evolution of technology to support wealth creation and the development of human societies.

El concepto de desarrollo económico ha estado ligado al cambio en cuanto a mejora de los procesos y productos, que se traduzcan en un impacto positivo de los resultados. En cierta forma, es una manera de concebir la innovación. A pesar de que este concepto nace y evoluciona principalmente para el sector manufacturero, ha llegado a ser aplicado a los servicios, donde los hoteles forman un grupo importante. En éstos, priman las particularidades de sus actividades para efectos de considerar la gestión de la innovación. Los estudios aquí analizados hacen énfasis en el papel del capital humano, el ambiente empresarial, el efecto del tamaño del hotel, la orientación al cliente, entre otros aspectos. Se concluye en ellos también un mayor énfasis en la innovación incremental (mejora en los servicios y procesos existentes) que en la innovación radical (la creación de nuevos servicios), así como en la adquisición de tecnología externa para innovar, por encima de la creación interna de proceso...

320 pp. Routledge (Transaction) – In Scientific Controversies, Dominique Raynaud shows how organized debates in the sciences help us establish or verify our knowledge of the world. If debates focus on form, scientific controversies are akin to public debates that can be understood within the framework of theories of conflict. If they focus on content, then such controversies have to do with a specific activity and address the nature of science itself. Understanding the major focus of a scientific controversy is a first step toward understanding these debates and assessing their merits.
Controversies of unique socio-historic context, disciplines, and characteristics are examined: Pasteur’s germ theory and Pouchet’s theory of spontaneous generation; vitalism advocated at Montpellier versus experimental medicine in Paris; the science of optics about the propagation of visual rays; the origins of relativism (the Duhem-Quine problem). Touching on the work of Boudon, Popper, and others, Raynaud puts forward an incrementalist theory about the advancement of science through scientific controversies.
The debates Raynaud has selected share in common their pivotal importance to the history of the sciences. By understanding the role of controversy, we better understand the functioning of science and the stakes of the contemporary scientific debates.

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of strategic alliance partner characteristics namely (partner complementarity, partner commitment, and partner compatibility) on firm’s innovation, which includes incremental innovation and radical innovation. The population of the study contained (13) Jordanian Pharmaceutical companies, and the sample unit consisted from (122) managers and head of divisions working in strategic alliances, marketing and production areas within the target companies. In order to gathering the data required for measuring the study variables a questionnaire was developed. The results of the study showed that the strategic alliance partner characteristics had a significant impact on the Jordanian pharmaceutical companies ’ innovation, and the impact of alliance partner characteristics (Compatibility, Capabilities, and Commitment) on incremental innovation is more than the impact on radical innovation. Also the results showed that the complementarity of partn...

Functional modelling is an analytical approach to design problems that is widely taught in certain academic communities but not often used by practitioners. This approach can be applied in multiple ways to formalize the understanding of the systems, to support the synthesis of the design in the development of a new product or to support the analysis and improvement of existing systems incrementally. The type of usage depends on the objectives that are targeted. The objectives can be categorized into two key groups: discovering a totally new solution, or improving an existing one. This article proposes to use the functional modelling approach to achieve three goals; to support the representation of physics-based reasoning, to use this physics-based reasoning to assess design options, and finally to support innovative ideation. The exemplification of the function-based approach is presented via a case study of a glue gun proposed for this special issue. A reverse engineering approach is applied, and the authors seek an incremental improvement of the solution. Since the physics-based reasoning model presented in this article is heavily dependent on the quality of the functional model, the authors propose a general approach to limit the interpretability of the functional representations by mapping the functional vocabulary with elementary structural blocks derived from bond graph theory. The physics-based reasoning approach is supported by a mathematical framework which is summarized in the article. The physics-based reasoning model is used for discovering the limitations of solutions in the form of internal contradictions and guiding the design ideation effort.

The notion of `participation, and the democratization of design' is not just a movement for social innovation but it is also a powerful methodology for the innovation of products and services.  However, the complicated nature of participatory design may result in the failure of projects.  The concept of participatory design is similar to climb “mount improbable”. Mount improbable is the metaphor developed by Dawkins to support Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. He uses the term "mount improbable" to explain the development of natural objects or events, and how unlikely it is that these natural phenomena are simply a result of coincidence. The concept of climbing mount improbable could be devised to understand the innovation process in participatory design. How do innovations evolve when using participatory methods? This paper examines the user involvement in participatory design with evolutionary understanding of success of products “selection” phenomenon either natural or artificial, which is explored through the perspective of design.