The Challenge of Breakthrough Innovations

"It is a false assumption of mankind to assume the resilience of outdated practices," said western thinker and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I agree with Žižek in supporting the statement that it is always necessary to find new solutions to problems. Innovation is paramount to our growth as a civilization, and will perish if not used, which can be exemplified through literature, history, and current world affairs.

In this essay I will describe and explain the causes and consequences of disruptive innovation. Firstly I will write about what dualism is, why it is important and how to achieve it. I will continue with describing difficulties, which may occur on a company’s path towards it, namely overshooting and inability to recognize the start of a new industry cycle. Further on, I will go deeper in the reasons, why incumbents fail to recognize the new entrants on the market, specifically “attack from below” and other discontinuous patterns of change. In the end I will describe some of the responses taken by established companies to disruptive technologies.

The book is for veterans, managers, executive leaders and striving entrepreneurs to teach their operatives how to be inventive, ground breaking and viable in a very completive industry. The vision of the author Blending extensive industry experience and real-world case studies with their academic expertise, the authors arm readers with the combination of the necessary tools to help them make better strategic decisions.

Other companies have used Disruptive Innovation to come in at the bottom of a market and focus on a lower cost and change the way consumers purchase goods and services, changing the market forever. One of the best examples of this type of Disruptive Innovation was Toyota. Toyota came into the American market and offered inexpensive cars that offered very view features and small 4 cylinder engines. At first many consumers turned their nose up to the Toyota products. But some consumers bought the Toyota because they were a cheaper option for automobile transportation. When more customers started to purchase Toyotas and the company was able to establish a solid footing in the American Business market and they started to change the model of their business. Toyota started to offer higher end cars and eventually moved into the luxury automobile industry with the Lexus line of cars. Disruptive innovation is a continual process and happens in business all the time. You can also see it in the car market right now with Hyundai and Kia.

According to the Innovation Policy Platform, a radical or disruptive innovation is an “innovation that has a significant impact on a market and on the economic activity of firms in that market.” (Radical and incremental innovation, 2013, p. 1). From this definition, IBM is a prime example of a radical innovation. The Watson super computer has performed activities no other invention has before. IBM has gone through at least five radical changes in its environment such as

A renewable entrepreneurial enterprise must juggle, balance and integrate two phenomena, each requiring radically different values, mindsets, leadership and management approaches. The first is "sustaining innovations," which are basically improvements to a currently-existing business framework, and which milk the current business model and value proposition for all they are worth. The second is "disruptive innovations," which are innovations that threaten the currently existing business framework by fundamentally changing the rules of the game.

Tidd et al (2000) states, “the innovation is a business process of revolving opportunity into new ideas and of putting these into widely used practice. In term of the nature, there are five major types of innovations: novelty, competence shifting, complexity, robust design and continuous improvement. While in term of the extent of change, innovations can be divided into incremental, radical and

al., 2000; Smith, 2002; Unsworth and Parker, Year 2003). To achieve a continuous flow of

If innovation is a the successful implementation of a new process that brings about positive change for an organization, disruptive innovation is a new process, service or technology that brings about a positive change within an entire market or industry. Thomond, Herzberg and Lettice, (2003) attempt to clarify disruptive innovation as:

Goggin and Mitchell (2010) states that “Comparing the various definitions of innovation, it can be seen that there are several common elements what is changed (such as product or process changes); how much is changed (whether it is completely new or only perceived as such); the source of the change (sometimes technology); the influence of the change (for example, its social or commercial value)”

The challenge here is how does a company want to innovate and how will they control it. The company has to decide what technology they wish to pursue to innovate their products. Then they have to decide how they will be able to that, and then execute on such. How does the company want to innovate, how will they innovate, how will they respond to changes? A company has to answer questions like these, it often takes careful planning and setting goals for a company to be able to satisfy such questions.

Radical innovation should present a new product, service, practice or solution that significantly differs from previous experience. It usually comes with higher risks as there is no prior knowledge and competences are low (Schilling, 2011:vi). Introducing of a third generation (3G) telephony could be a good illustration of a radical innovation. 3G was launched with an increased bandwidth that could not only transmit a voice, but support more diverse multimedia applications (http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com). To switch from 2G to 3G the telecommunication service required significant investment in development of relevant equipment and infrastructure, such as larger device display, memory and battery capacity, etc. Besides, it was not quite clear how would customers react to this innovation. So, companies and their managers, had to evaluate different risks simultaneously, including technical achievability, reliability, costs, and demand.

Innovation is a common phenomenon among the organizations around the world in the current business scenarios. Finding a new solution to an existing product, process, services, technologies or ideas and meet the newer constraints of the market or society is innovation. The term can be used in the sense of finding

The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value for which consumers will pay is called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberal application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. In a social context, innovation helps to create new methods for alliance creation, joint venturing, flexible work hours, and creation of buyers ' purchasing power.

Companies live and breathe innovation; or, at the terribly least, notice it basic to their success. Such companies are those that others ought to emulate for they recognize that to do business, as Peter Drucker prompt in an exceedingly recent Harvard Business review article, “Every firm—not simply businesses—needs one core competence: innovation.”