Strategy for Adopting Discontinuous Innovation Coursework

Essays on Strategy for Adopting Discontinuous Innovation Coursework The paper "Strategy for Adopting Discontinuous Innovation" is a brilliant example of a term paper on marketing. The paper tries to answer the three Ws of discontinuous innovation. That is it answers the what, why and when of discontinuous innovation. It also explains the situation at hand and proposes a solution to the problem. The first section of the paper tries to answer the question that what discontinuous innovation all about? It tries to explain it in terms of the market and describe the history. It also compares continuous and discontinuous innovation and the scenarios in which they are effective. The second section is inclined towards explaining the circumstances that the company is facing and the approach that it should adopt. The last section explains the risks that are involved with discontinuous innovation and what kind of approach we should adopt to achieve it.IntroductionInnovation is a creation that results from study and experimentation. In terms of business, innovati ve product is one that increases the benefits and decreases the costs. Successful innovation is one that makes the impossible possible. Then what is discontinuous innovation? Discontinuous innovation presents a very new concept to the customer, one that the customer has never experienced and thus customer has extensive experience of learning and research. Another definition describes discontinuous innovation as entirely ‘new-to-the-world’ products, which are design, and manufactured to perform some function for which previously there were no products available in the market. A product that changes the stature or in other words ‘game’ of the company, we refer to it as discontinuous innovation. Data collected from twelve discontinuous innovation projects during 5 years from 10 mature firms reveals the difficulties or hurdles that they encountered during the transition from the Research and Development phase to the operating unit. For example, Hewlett-Packard' s inkjet printer indicates a discontinuous innovation approach. Disposable diapers, first introduced by Procter Gamble, decimated cloth diaper service providers. PG owned the market for this product from the 1960s to the mid-1980. Film photography (by Kodak) eliminated glass plate photography, although it took over 15 years to do so. (Kaplan, S.M. (1999), "Discontinuous innovation and the growth paradox", Strategy Leadership, Vol. 27 No.2)Continuous and discontinuous innovation-A comparisonIn this section, we endeavor to identify the differences between the two innovations which is extremely necessary to understand and make the right choices at the right times. Following are the basic features of continuous innovations:Continuous innovations are incremental, that is we perform them in the form of a loop. Moreover, we use existing models for their implementation. The bases of continuous innovations rely on existing knowledge from the industry and market approach. It does not challe nge those approaches but strives to work with them.