Most advanced yet acceptable, but don’t forget

Radical product and/or service innovation can ideally benefit all people and firms, and society as a whole, but pose risks in regards to technology-, industry chain-, market-, and project- uncertainty. In this paper we focus on addressing market uncertainty and argue that this uncertainty is affected by the meaningfulness of radical product and/or service innovations due to meaning gaps created during the innovation process. We investigate and suggest ways to bridge such gaps through theory inspired research using a design case study. Results show that in addition to introducing new meanings next to existing meanings, one should also select what meanings to dispose and which (lost) meanings to potentially re-introduce. With this work we hope to inspire design and innovation thinking on how to improve radical innovation adoption by addressing meaning gaps caused during the radical innovation process.