People that do believe you need to be innovative are in for a rude awakening when they actually do something innovative successfully only to find out a year later there are now 5 competitors copying you, with decent success.
Go all the way back to the first guy who made the first screw. A foundational innovation. The critics of the day might have said, “that’s not an innovation, he just wrapped an incline plane around a cylinder. What a joke.” Prior to that when the incline plane was described the critics may have said, “wow, what an amazing and ‘innovative’ scientist, he thinks he invented hills. Ha.”
There is no hard line that separates evolution from revolution at the design stage. It’s really up to the market. Seemingly small changes, like pre-sliced bread, can change everything. While things people think will be revolutionary fall flat… remember when the Segway (Ginger) hype, it was going to change the design of cities. It didn’t.