Comparative Analysis of Cited Patents of Incremental Innovation and Radical Innovation

Abstract

Innovation can be classified into two types: incremental innovation and radical innovation. Incremental innovation is a series of improvement of existing technologies. Radical innovation completely replaces existing technologies. Creating both innovation is essential for firms to achieve sustainable development. Although many exiting studies have analyzed innovation by using patent data, none of them distinguish two innovations. This study classifies patents into “incremental patent" and “radical patent" representing incremental innovation and radical innovation, respectively. Furthermore, we clarify the characteristics of both patents focusing on their cited patents.