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Often, I read that incrementalism is dead. And the way forward is innovation. I view the debate differently.

Within organizations there is a diverse group of people. I see incrementalism and innovation as different tools within a tool chest. You would never think of using a wrench in place of a screw driver. So why would you expect to have a kaizen to address getting the last 0.1% rework out of a bottleneck process?

I believe the biggest error made when working with innovation and incremental tools, is the misalignment assigning individuals to each tool and not understanding the shortcoming of each.