Developing a Product Innovation and Technology Strategy for Your Business: A Framework for Developing a Product Innovation Strategy Includes Defining Innovation Goals and Objectives, Selecting Strategic Arenas, Developing a Strategic Map, and Allocating Resources

Abstract

In the late 1990s, two large firms were growing by leaps and bounds, driven by the boom in fiber-optic communications. They were Coming Glass, which manufactured fiber-optic cable, and Nortel Networks, which produced the boxes at each end of the cable to convert the light signal into an electronic signal. Then came the crash of 2000; overnight, both firms' sales plummeted, and their share prices plunged from over $100 to about $1. Ten years later, Coming is thriving, whereas Nortel is in Chapter 11 and being broken up. Why? How did two great and innovative companies, facing the same crisis, end up so differently a short decade later? One reason for Nortel's demise is that the company lacked direction and an innovation strategy after the crash; instead, it limped along from one ad hoc decision to the next. By contrast, Corning's senior management took charge, developed a strong product innovation and technology strategy for the firm, and provided leadership and direction to see that strategy through (1). Corning's management took a hard look at the company's previous 100 years of successes in innovation and what drove them. They concluded that the repeatable keys to success--the elements in Corning's culture and history that they could draw on to face this new challenge--were a leadership commitment, a clear understanding of the company's capabilities, a strong connection to the customer and a deep understanding of major customer problems, and a willingness to take big but well-understood risks. Strongly committed to breaking out of the crisis through innovation, management assessed Corning's core competencies, determined what they could leverage, and matched those strengths to emerging and adjacent market opportunities. The result was a renewed innovation strategy and a three-pronged strategic attack that called for the company to grow current businesses via product-line extensions, exploit market adjacencies, and create totally new opportunities. The latter two thrusts required a heavy emphasis on exploratory research and new business development, and thus, in spite of financial difficulties, RD it must have a widely understood role in broader business goal. Further, the innovation strategy implemented in best-performing businesses is more than just a list of this year's development projects; it has a much longer-term commitment. Companies with effective product innovation programs rely on a number of tools to implement them, including strategic buckets for resource allocation and strategic product roadmaps. Across the board, top-performing businesses build these elements into their product innovation strategy; poorly performing businesses do not. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.