Courses/Ingenuity 601/Innolution/Innovative Companies

Company A
Country Canada

Company Size Medium (~700 employees)

Product Category Large interactive displays

Product Market Education

Process of Innovation

Company A has set up a full time employee to act as the liaison between the academic research community and the company. Currently, there is no formal process for bringing innovative ideas to product, but the external research manager has himself been involved with bringing research ideas to product. Over the past 6 years this individual has worked very hard within the company to understand the various processes within the company so that he could make sure that the innovative ideas he presents are directly in line with the corporate objective. His goal is to establish a team of researchers, where he would direct their research through the innovation process within the company. The external research manager attends many academic and industry conferences each year to understand the latest advancements and future potential markets for Company A. It should be noted that research ideas a typically sustainable innovations. Disruptive innovations are typically not pursued until their competitors have already established a market for such technologies. Then the company radically tries to shift gears to build competing products by leveraging their currently dominating share of the large interactive display market.

Example of Innovation

The external research manager was the first PhD employed by Company A. He was involved with developing technologies for a new generation of vision based large interactive displays. This process took place over 5 years, required significant push from the researcher and certain members of senior management. However, it provided clear benefits over the existing production method (including cost and feature benefits). While still not the dominant product sold by Company A, this technology was a real stepping stone towards edging that company apart from its competitors by leveraging the plummeting costs of LCD and Plasma television displays. While this process takes a very long time, the impact of this innovation is substantial as the company produces over 150’000 large interactive displays a year.

Company B
Country USA

Company Size Startup (10 employees)

Product Category Large interactive displays

Product Market High end clients (military, air traffic control, wealthy investors)

Process of Innovation

Company B is actively introducing a new touch technology for interactive large displays. It was originally started in an academic institution where the founder worked finished his PhD and decided to pursue work in large display touch technologies. He made an academic presentation of his work to great fanfare and it wasn’t long before videos of his research made their way through popular video sites such as YouTube and then the news. This is certainly no accident, the founder is an expert showman who was publishing in the Computer graphics community prior to doing touch interactions. So much so that he is the person the media contact first when a new multi touch technology is introduced. Strong positive response to his work prompted him to create a startup company to make these technologies available to select clients. Contracts typically range around $100’000 and include custom software and hardware development. This is likely the best strategy for Company B as they do not have any manufacturing capacity at this point in time. While profit margins are high, client needs are also very specific and demanding. Employees in this company remain very connected to clients and industry conferences as they are typically doing conferences and presenting the new touch technology to a wide audience. It should also be noted that the barriers to innovation are extremely small. Similar to the initial graphical user interface developers at Apple, new interaction techniques/innovations are written, refined and then shipped. Radically new idea need only be approved by the founder to be integrated into products. While the target audience is small, videos of this work appeals to a mass audience.

Example of innovation

Included in the process description

Company C
Country International, mostly USA

Company Size Very Large (>10’000 employees)

Product Category Web Development

Product Market General public

Process of Innovation

Company C places PhDs into two categories: engineers and researchers. Engineers are typically told what to do by upper management and are given a portion of their time to work on a project of their own choosing. In practice, it is quite the battle to maintain this time as product deadlines typically take priority. Researchers are typically hired because of their expertise in a particular area of interest and are typically established members of the academic community. They are allowed to spend 100% of their time on projects of their choosing with the requirement that projects be approved by managers. Research in Company C must be applicable to products within the 2-3 year range. Researchers are evaluated based upon their impact on products rather than their contribution to the academic research community. While there are academic publications in top tier conferences from this company, the number of academic publications from this company pales in comparison to its size. Because of the focus on products within this company there is a very blurred line between researchers and engineers especially when it comes close to product release deadlines. For this Company C has been mostly focused on sustaining innovations rather than disruptive ones. When a disruptive technology arises that threatens the market share of Company C, a typical approach is to either build a competing product or buy out the company. Most innovation within this company comes from buying out other companies.

Example of Innovation

An example of a sustaining innovation would be the introduction of a connection between searching for addresses and connecting this to map data. While a simple idea, most of the time is spent understanding and using the back end infrastructure to make such an action possible and making sure that loads are balanced in various system stress tests. The engineer that came up with the idea works very closely with a product group until the idea is released into a product. Then support and maintenance is taken care of by a separate team with the occasional request for support to the original engineer.

Company D
Country Holland

Company Size Very Large (>10’000 employees)

Product Category Electronics

Product Market General consumers

Process of Innovation

TBA

Company E
Country Finland

Company Size Very Large (>10’000 employees)

Product Category Phone Industry

Product Market General public

Process of Innovation

TBA

Company F
Country Japan

Company Size Very Large (>10 000 employees)

Product Category Electronics

Product Market General consumers

Process of Innovation

TBA