Radical, Disruptive, Discontinuous and Breakthrough Innovation – Interchangeable, Related or Merely Co-existing Labels?

In this paper, we present a bibliographic review of academic scholarship on ‘exceptional’ innovation, a specific type of innovation that is commonly characterized by a high degree of technological novelty and/or a significant impact on markets. Despite growing interest from innovation scholars, research on this topic has been qualified as ambiguous, largely due to scholars’ reliance on a plethora of labels and definitions. We aim to clarify the use of these terms by systematically reviewing the existing body of academic literature that explicitly refers to them. We combine two bibliometric techniques – bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis to (i) explore the theoretical foundations of publications referring to different labels and (ii) to delineate the thematic orientation of the scholarship on exceptional innovation. Our results reveal a dense network of publications consisting of five thematic clusters that have been pursued persistently. Rather than representing distinct silos of publications that adhere to a certain label, these clusters capture themes common across publications relying on different labels. Therefore, these themes could serve as a catalyst towards a more unified study of exceptional innovation. Whereas it can be argued that variety of terms – to denote seemingly highly related phenomena – might be confusing for outsiders as well as for the advancement of theory and insights informing practitioners, our analyses do not signal detrimental effects in terms of the growth of the field.