Summary
Includes related articles - Panel Discussion
Company presidents and CEOs are convinced that innovation alone is not sufficient to ensure the success of a product in the marketplace. These business executives, which include Nashua Corp.'s Gerry Garbacz and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care's Manny Ferris, believe that generating profits from new ideas depends upon a company's ability to overcome internal organizational barriers that prevents the successful commercialization of new products. They are convinced that corporations worldwide can learn a lesson from Japan which was able to earn revenues from products they did not develop, such as the compact disc player and the video camcorder. The CEOs also believe that a competitive delivery system and extensive coordination across boundaries of the organizational structure are essential to the success of innovative products in today's highly competitive market.See the full content of this document
Extract
Are you empowering innovation?
Are you championing innovation in your organization? Or are you killing it with red tape, overly complex systems, and the wrong incentives? CEOs discuss the necessity of innovation - and examine how they may be hindering it.
After years of cost-cutting, restructuring, and downsizing, it is clear that rationalization is no substitute for building the business. Any intelligent growth strategy must have innovation at its center. But how does one intelligently go about fostering innovation beyond the usual platitudes? The pace of innovation is becoming more frantic. Silicon Graphics CEO Ed McCracken is fond of saying that anything that works must be obsolete. Shorter product life cycles, market deregulation, and the relentless march of global competition have created an environment in which the latest innovative product or service often comes from a previously unknown source. The following roundtable, conducted in partnership with Coopers & Lybrand L.L.P., examines the willingness of CEOs to scrutinize the standard model of innovation. The linear approach - where ideas hatched in R&D move to production testing, and then to manufacturing and marketing - has maintained a hold on our consciousness, even though it's not what often happens. Does innovation have bottom-line implications? An OECD study on innovation and competitive advantage failed to find a positive link between companies that innovative and corporate performance. Consider Sony's Betamax VCR system, which was clearly superior technologically to the VHS standard, but it was the latter standard that prevailed in the marketplace. Apple's operating system is still said to be easier to use than MS DOS, but to little avail, since Microsoft is used on more than 90 percent of today's PCs. As our assembled CEOs in this roundtable agree, there's more to inn...See the full content of this document
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