[Sigia-l] Not All Innovations Are Equal?

[Pradyot Rai]

Listera:
> > 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.

I was referring to authors remark about innovation in context with
Best Practices--
"As essential as it is to the long-term health of organizations,
knowledge about best practices for managing strategic innovation is
scarce. For every strategic experiment studied, we observed a unique
approach to management. There is no commonly accepted principle or
standard."

It is dumb to apply best practices for the sake of it, or because they
have worked somewhere else. But such cases do have insights. How do
you use them?

We can witness this with Apple. Apple's belief was to "vertically
integrate" and spend huge money on R&D, marketing, brand, design, at
the time when most of the folks were walking away from those practices
(or doing it much more collaboratively). Was that very innovative? It
is debatable. But looking at the pace with which they lost market
share in computer industry proves that it was a bad strategy (also
lacked "innovation").

But in 1999 they used the same wisdom (call it best practice) to
transform their business into music industry. They had valuable assets
to design, inculcate the culture and biggest of all - experience with
verticle integration of hardware, software and services, which
ultimately did the magic. At the time when giants like BMG, HP, SONY,
Microsoft failed, Apple won. How did they do it? Most of the magazine
covers are filled with the answer. And that is Apple's ability to
lead-by-innovation. This may not just be centered arround the Product,
but all arround product+software+services.

The lesson from Apple's story is that you may have strategy, and so
can many others in the league. But if you lack innovation to apply
your resources, capabilities to grab on the opportunities from others,
you will fail. Innovation has no alternative, unless you are a
monopolist, government charter, or have attained full growth in your
industry. And "innovation" is only alternative to many firms who are
trying to break barriers of entry from high capital requirements,
experience curve, or huge infrastructural base.

Listera:
> Apple is not seeking novelty of invention/innovation as an end in itself any
> longer. Apple, for example, is seen as an innovator in the digital music
> sphere. But its "innovation" is not really in any one aspect of hardware or
> software, pretty much everything they rely on existed previously. What's
> innovative here is putting everything together in a coherent, synergistic
> strategy.

True. And as you mentioned it too, Apple is rewarded with the word
"Innovative" for doing that. Apple is more innovative today than they
were in the past. In fact, most of the academicians and corporate
analyst tend to believe that Apple never had any strategy. The same
attribute makes them skeptic because they believe "Innovation" =
"added risk". This is a mindset not a fact backed up by any history.

Listera:
> In the end, strategy and innovation are intimately intertwined.
> It's when one separates them comes trouble.

That's were we both are talking same thing. Difference is, I use this
to say "there's no startegy without innovation", and you - "innovation
as a last resort". But, that is understandable. Probably I am looking
at a segment of industry which is growth oriented, changes fast and
need to differentiate itself from the lot.

Thanks,
Prady