Final answer:
Innovations must be novel, meaning they introduce something new to the market. They can be incremental or disruptive, with disruptive innovation having a significant impact on industries, such as the advent of personal computers or digital photography.
Step-by-step explanation:
Innovations must essentially be novel. This refers to the introduction of something new, whether it's a product, a process, or a system that wasn't in use before. Innovation can be incremental, which means making improvements or modifications to an existing product or process, or it can be disruptive, which signifies a major impact on an entire industry—potentially creating new markets or even making old technologies obsolete.
Disruptive innovation is not just about being novel; it often starts by targeting underserved markets and then evolves to outcompete established technologies. For example, personal computers were a disruptive technology that began with a focus on hobbyists and home users and eventually displaced mainframe and minicomputers in many applications.
Incremental design, on the other hand, suggests a focus on enhancements and modifications to what already exists. Such evolutionary changes are seen in the development of storage devices, from floppy disks to Zip disks and eventually to flash drives.
Each generation provided improvements over the previous technology. Examples of disruptive technology include digital photography, which revolutionized the camera industry, and ride-sharing services, which disrupted traditional taxi services.