Vision and Radical Innovation: A Typology

In this chapter, we investigate the nature of vision and its potential evolution pathways, in the case of radical innovation. To set the stage, radical innovation and its importance are discussed. Given the importance of vision for firm success in the radical innovation context, vision is deconstructed in order to better understand its three core components—the goal, the passion underlying it and the clarity of the vision. The composition of vision tends to change and become more elaborated over time, depending on its nature, how it begins and who is involved. Given this, a typology is created which is made up of four characteristic combinations of ‘who’ and ‘where’ a radically innovative vision may exist in time and place. As such, four types of vision are characterized which play an essential role in the front-end of radical innovation: value-driven vision, technology vision, bottom-up market vision and top-down market vision.