Determination of Radical Innovation Types

Due to increasing environmental dynamics, the initiation of fundamental structural change is of great importance for today's companies. Based on their high degree of novelty, radical innovations are vital for initiating such discontinuous change. Thus, radical innovations offer companies the opportunity to secure a sustainable competitive advantage. However, the number of successfully implemented radical innovations is low. The reason for this is not based on a lack of high potential ideas. The challenge rather is within the implementation and commercialization of these ideas. At this, the success potentials of an idea, which can be influenced by the innovator, are not sufficiently focused during their implementation. Consequently, neglecting these success potentials leads to the fact that specific needs of the innovation, such as capital and knowledge, are not adequately promoted. As a result, promising ideas for radical product innovations experience a lack of resource support and, thus, do not reach the execution phase or miss their later market potential. In this regard, a model for the determination of radical innovation types is developed within this paper in order to describe type-specific needs for a successful implementation.