What makes an Innovation Radical? Finding the "radicalness" in radical innovation adoption

This study explores the factors that contribute towards the perception of an innovation as radical by its adopters. This paper addresses an important conceptual gap in the innovation literature by identifying the attributes which make an innovation radical. Prior conceptualizations of radicalness have been useful but incomplete and have often assumed that term “radicalness of an innovation” is clearly understood and means the same for all managers. This however may be far from truth. The same innovation may be characterized as radical by different managers for very different underlying reasons and it may even be characterized as incremental (very low on radicalness scale) by others. For the practitioner this lack of definitional clarity means not being able to understand the inherent attributes of radicalness and not being able to effectively develop or respond to radical innovations. More over from the theoretical and academic perspective, it becomes difficult to aggregate results from different studies which leads to ambiguity in understanding and explaining the effects of radicalness on adoption and implementation decisions and outcomes. We argue that technology radicalness is better understood and measured as a formative construct with four critical sub dimensions (Amount/extent of new knowledge, nature of concept change, nature of component change, nature of linkage change) each of which contribute to the degree of perceived radicalness of a technology.