This is about adding or improving one after another feature of products and also processes to produce them. Incremental innovation is vital to keep increasing the perceived value and also reducing the cost, often simultaneously. In the absence of incremental innovation capability, the ability to make keeps losing competitiveness.
Due to a lack of focus on this capability, import substitution capability has been failing to develop sustainable industrial capacity in many developing countries. Moreover, weakness in incremental innovation is also limiting the scope of benefiting from technology transfer. For entering into an innovation economy, developing countries should focus on this vital capacity. Although incremental advancement does not make much appeal at the beginning, over time, small steps keep adding up as a good to geat winning strategy.
