[Sigia-l] Not All Innovations Are Equal?

[Listera]

Pradyot Rai:

> That begs the original question - can there be any business strategy,
> which will demands NO-innovation?

Other than some exceptional situations one can concoct, no. Because if there
are no differentiating factors of any kind, then one's competitiveness, even
in a commodity environment, is greatly diminished. Market economies force
such players to irrelevance pretty quickly.

Take the nemesis of Apple, for instance. Dell can't innovate itself out of a
paper bag, except in its supply chain/pricing ops. That (no-product level
innovation) has carried it to the top of the PC business, but now Dell finds
itself attached to the "beleaguered company" label, squeezed at the low end
by no-name clones/Lenovo and Apple at the high end.
 
> it seems that there's no alternative to innovation,

Again, look at Apple. It used to be that an Apple computer was chockfull of
proprietary hardware across the board. That was very expensive to design and
manufacture. Whatever edge Apple had in terms of  the innovative nature of
these components was dwarfed by the sheer cost of maintaining an Apple-only
universe. Today pretty much everything in an Apple box is "off-the-shelf."
Apple no longer "innovates" its own video cards, DSPs, I/O busses, iPod
subsystems, etc. OS X and many Apple apps are based largely on open source
frameworks.

The big difference is that Apple now innovates as a last resort, not as the
knee-jerk reaction that comes out of the not-invented-here syndrome.

> as it is with good strategy, processes or able management.

Not coincidentally, Apple now has the best inventory turn over management in
the PC business, something unthinkable just a few years ago.

> "...There is no commonly accepted principle or standard."

Does the sun rise every morning? :-)
 
> Innovation is the driver if you apply somebody else's best practices too.

Not sure what you mean here. Product after product, year after year, the
entire PC industry has tried to emulate Apple (from iMacs to iPods), the
results speak for themselves.

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."