Basic Innovations, Radically New Products, Major Innovations: An Assessment of Recent Research

Data on so-called basic innovations have recently been collected by Mensch (1971, 1975), van Duijn (1979, 1981, 1983), and Haustein/Neuwirth (1982). Mensch’s data, the first to be published, have drawn greatest attention in the literature. His approach and the criticisms of it will therefore be discussed in rather more detail. Mensch distinguishes between basic innovations, improvement innovations, and pseudo-innovations. Basic innovations can be product innovations (television, penicillin, helicopters) or process innovations (catalytic petrol cracking, cotton pickers, oxygen steel making). They are ‘great deeds in technology’ which lay the base for new growth industries or for rejuvenating older industries. Once introduced into the market, basic innovations are assumed to be followed by series of quality-augmenting improvement innovations and cost-reducing process innovations which foster the growth of the innovating industries. In the longer run, these improvement and process innovations are assumed to be governed by the law of diminishing returns on further improvement efforts; consequently, in the course of expansion of the new industries, real improvements are increasingly replaced by pseudo-innovations.