Managing the Innovation Process

Innovation in nowadays is the most important competitive advantage for a company. The future of many businesses depends on their ability to innovate, to be ahead of their competitors. Organisations have to go through a process of practice, mistakes and to bring together different knowledge, skills and ideas to manage innovation process to success. The word innovation comes from the Latin word “innovare”, which means “to make something new”. Innovation is a deceptive thing. People usually relate it to a development of a new or better product or process, but it is only one part of process called innovation. Innovation is a process, which has to be established in the company for continued enhancement. In reality, a view of innovation as a single action can never make the company to succeed in the long run. There are two different types of innovation; radical and incremental. Incremental innovation consists of small Continue reading

Case Study of Mercedes Benz: The Role of Innovation in Organization Success

Mercedes is one of the companies that stood at the origins of the automotive industry, its name is no longer just a world-famous brand, but a real legend with a million-strong army of fans owning cars of this brand and an even wider audience of those who dream of it. Mercedes is the embodiment of German quality, reliability, and technical excellence, a symbol of high style, elegance, and respectability. Owning a Mercedes-Benz car demonstrates the status of a host who is not used to saving on himself and his safety. It is difficult to imagine such a person acquiring Mercedes spare parts on the market or in doubtful points. The manufacturer made sure that the original Mercedes auto parts were available to car owners wherever they live or wherever they are. Mercedes-Benz has been a classic in the automotive industry for more than a hundred years. The history of the Continue reading

Sustaining and Disruptive Technologies

In 1997, the best-selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen came up with two basic categories of technologies: sustaining and disruptive. Christensen in his sequel, “The Innovators Solution” has changed the term disruptive technology to “disruptive innovation” to accentuate that it is not exactly the technology that is disruptive but the strategy of the innovation that leads to disruption. Read More:  The Innovator’s Dilemma Sustaining Technologies Sustaining Technologies is an incremental increase in the features or performance for an established product. Some sustaining technologies can be discontinuous or radical in nature, while others are of incremental nature. They basically rely on improvements along with the dimensions of performance in an already established technology. We can see some significant percentages of the innovations we come across are sustaining innovations. We can consider an example of desktop computers. The significant natures of computers have not changed since Continue reading

Role of Innovation and Creativity to Enhance Entrepreneurship

Innovation is the process of translating invention or idea into a process, good or service that creates value for customers, government or organizations. Innovation also involve implementation of new or significantly improved product that creates value to the society. The idea must therefore satisfy a specific need in order to be regarded as innovative. The customers’ change in taste and preferences requires organization to generate new ideas that can be applied to processes, products and services to satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers. The innovation is prerequisite for business organization to create revolutionary products that create new markets. The scientific knowledge generated through experimentation studies has contributed immensely to creation of many things that has not previously been in existence. With this regard, organization need to allocate resources for research to stimulate innovation that increases competitive advantage. The IT industries producing electrical like phones, tablets, laptops and desktop Continue reading

The Emergence of Frugal Innovation

The old innovation paradigm was called closed innovation which was based on the strict control of successful innovation. Under this view, organizations generate their own ideas, develop them, finance them and support them on their own. In short, companies maintain complete control of all aspects of the innovation process and inventions are kept highly secretive. Traditionally many organizations followed this model and it worked well for most of the twentieth century. However, over the years a number of factors have led to the erosion of the closed innovation approach. First, due to an increase in the mobility and availability of highly educated people, large amounts of knowledge leave the research laboratories of many companies. Second, the availability of venture capital has increased significantly in the recent past making it possible for promising ideas and technologies to be further developed outside the organization. Third, other firms in the supply chain began Continue reading

How Innovation Contributes to Competitive Advantage?

From competitive environment, products within the same marketing from each provider are quite similar and difficult for customers to realize the difference. Innovation capability is the key productivity that creates competitive advantage by perceiving or discovering the new or better way to compete in an industry and launch them into the market. One of success factor depends on innovation’s relative advantage. Innovation has become the most important asset that creates competitive advantage for company, and the first mover advantage when getting magnitude of market acceptance. In the long run, maintaining product innovation is the way to sustain competitive advantage and drive the growth of productivity for further competitiveness of the company. However, product innovation always comes along with new process technology. Around half of the Fortune 500 in 1980s was disappeared from the list in 1990s because of three fundamental forces; wealth, fashion and invention. From this information, it showed Continue reading