Innovation diffusion uncertainty: incremental and radical innovations compared
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Much research on innovations assumes a dichotomy of disruptive radical innovations versus more incremental ones and focuses on the diffusion of radical ones. However, incremental innovations have their own complexities. Some innovations based on incremental technologies may require radical organizational changes to implement while others are more fully incremental, leading to different technological and organizational uncertainties. Because incremental innovations can be consequential for both industries and individual firms, we develop theory on how the resulting diffusion processes differ. We analyze how the airline industry adopted three strategically important innovations with different technical and organizational uncertainty configurations—one purely incremental, one technologically radical, and one requiring radical organizational changes. The findings show information from prior adopters impacts adoption, as commonly demonstrated in diffusion studies, but only for the two innovations that were radical. The purely incremental case had no such effect. This overall suggests that firms rely on information from peer actions and early experiences to reduce both technological and organizational uncertainty similarly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".