Two broad types of innovation drive most change in any industry. Incremental innovation improves what already exists, one small step at a time. Disruptive innovation starts cheap or crude at the edge of a market and improves until it displaces the leaders, a pattern the Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen and his collaborators named in 1995. The line between the two, though, blurs in real markets.
Economists drew this line long before the business books. The OECD’s Oslo Manual of 1997 quotes Joseph Schumpeter on the two speeds. Radical innovations, he wrote, shape big changes in the world. Incremental ones fill in the process of change continuously. The site’s innovation coverage follows how both kinds reach the market.
Both modes sit side by side in real workplaces. Hospitals advance through steady, small upgrades. That step-by-step path is described in how surgeons and medtech companies learn to work together at IRCAD North America. Disruption, when it comes, tends to arrive from outside that careful loop.
What counts as incremental innovation?
An incremental innovation is a small step on a product or process that already exists. The Oslo Manual’s 1997 edition lists the forms change can take, following Schumpeter. Most updates in daily life fit one of them.
- A new product, or a real change to an old one
- A process new to an industry
- A new market, or new sources of supply
- A new way to organize a firm
Faster chips, clearer screens, and safer cars all sit on this list in spirit. Small steps compound. That slow fill-in, Schumpeter said, is how change proceeds most of the time. For related coverage, see What solid-state batteries still need before they reach cars.
What makes an innovation disruptive?
Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, gave the pattern a mechanism. Wikipedia’s entry on the book sums it up in two moves. Large incumbents listen to their best customers and keep polishing their products. New entrants serve small customers with cheap, rough technology. Then they improve it year by year, until it takes the main market. The term first appeared in a 1995 article, Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.
Is every big change disruptive?
No, and this is the theory’s sharpest edge. Wikipedia’s entry on disruptive innovation, as updated in 2026, uses the automobile as its test case. The first cars of the late 19th century were expensive luxury goods, so they disrupted nothing. The mass-produced car later remade the market. A change can be radical in engineering and still ordinary in effect.
The entry adds two cautions. Disruptive projects tend to take longer and carry more risk than incremental work. Their early sales look too small to bother with. Small teams, it notes, are more likely to produce them than large ones, and the payoff runs on a delay of years.
Where the evidence comes from
The field guide rests on case histories and a measurement manual, not experiments. Christensen built the pattern largely from the disk drive industry. That field moved so fast that researchers called it the fruit fly of technology studies. The excavator business supplied further cases, per the same entry. He also flagged the theory’s limits. In a 2015 interview with Forbes, cited in Wikipedia’s entry, he argued Uber was not disruptive by his own definition. It began with mainstream customers, not the low end. One case-based theory is one lens. The OECD manual exists because statisticians must count every other kind of change.
Conclusion
Incremental and disruptive innovation are not rivals so much as two clocks. One ticks steadily, filling in improvements, the way Schumpeter described. The other ticks rarely, when a cheap entrant grows into a threat. Knowing which clock a product runs on explains most boardroom surprises. Incumbents lose to improvements they chose not to make, or to entrants they chose not to see.
