Labelling innovations

When price tags were first introduced they were considered innovations. But what type of innovation were price tags? They were certainly not incremental (evolutionary/continuous) since they changed the way people bought and sold goods in quite a dramatic way (previously, people had to haggle). Nor were they disruptive as encumbent players at the time could easily switch to these little bits of paper. I'd say that they were a sustaining, radical business-model innovation.

Asking customers in a store to get his or her own food off the shelves, which is what we do in supermarkets, was also considered "weird" in the days when people were used to a store assistant doing it for them. What type of innovation was this? There are three dimensions that need to be considered when identifying an innovation:

1. Was it disruptive or sustaining?

2. Was it incremental (evolutionary/continuous) or radical (revolutionary/discontinuous)?

3. Was it a product, process, service, business model, value or market innovation? (You could add endless others to this list: for example, brand innovation.)

It's not easy labelling innovations, but it's useful to consider sustaining and disruptive innovations separately. Any thoughts on this?

[Link] This show, Culture Shock, from the BBC is great if you're interested in hearing about various unusual ideas from around the world.

innovation management in Asia