When someone performs a search on a search engine he/she will type in a word or phrase and then click on the search button. A new page will then be displayed listing all the web sites that use this phrase. If the person puts quotes around the phrase, then the web sites that a re listed will be those that use the exact phrase. We typed in various innovation types within Yahoo.com to see how many websites actually use terms like “disruptive technology” and “radical innovation”. Figure 1 below shows the results of this analysis.

Figure 1

The number of websites gives one an indication as to how popular a phrase is among authors, but does not indicate how popular this phrase is among users (people who are searching for this phrase.) To gather this information we went to bisart.com (search engine marketing company) and had them determine the popularity of innovation types. Bisart.com took each of our phrases and determined the number of times each phrase was searched for within the last 30 days on Yahoo.com, MSN.com, Altavista.com and other search engines. The results are contained within Figure 2.

Figure 2

To get a better idea of how popular a term was among firms and universities, we performed a search for the above phrases but this time we focused our results on only listing PDF files. A PDF file type search tends to display papers written by professionals and academics and as such gives us a better indicator than number of web sites as to the popularity of a term among this group. The results of this analysis are contained within Figure 3.

Figure 3

A summary of the three analyses done above can be found in Table 1 below. Based on this analysis we determined that the dominant innovation types/theories are Disruptive technology/Innovation; Radical Innovation, Open Innovation; Architectural Innovation, Discontinuous Innovation, Incremental Innovation, Continuous Innovation, and Sustaining Innovation.

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