The initial discussion of innovation has led to an appreciation ofdifferences between incremental innovation and radical innovation. Wecontend that the processes for successfully managing radical andincremental innovation are different and further that managingincremental innovation might be detrimental to the management of radicalinnovation. As a way of bringing these differences into focus, we usethe lens of an information processing approach to understanding thephenomena. The reason for this is that while the processes of innovationto date have been studied from a variety of perspectives, most of themare context bound. Information processing is largely context free,providing a theoretically parsimonious perspective applicable acrosscontexts. Hence, the aim of this paper is to suggest the use of aninformation processing approach for comparing the management of radicaland incremental innovation. Although innovation processes for bothradical and incremental innovation may span many years and consist ofmultiple phases, in this paper we focus on differences in the early oridea generation phases, i.e. the fuzzy front end (Page and Stovall,1994), between radical and breakthrough innovation. We discussdifferences between incremental and radical or breakthrough innovation.Following that, stages of innovation are discussed and then the notionsof information processing as applied to innovation are outlined. Resultsof a longitudinal study of breakthrough are presented along withimplications for a model of information processing at the fuzzy frontend of breakthrough innovations
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