Innovation Management

"Competences and endowments reinforce each other and, together, underpin the firm's profitability."

"Firms would like to offer products with superior attributes for which they can charge high prices while keeping costs low and competitors out. This is where innovation comes in."

"To be an innovation, an idea must be converted into a product or service that customers want."

"An innovation is said to be _radical_ if the technological knowledge required to exploit it is very different from existing knowledge, rendering exiting knowledge obsolete."

"Idea Generators are individuals who have the ability to sift through jungles of market and technological information to find ideas that lead to new products or services."

"In order to deliver low-cost or differentiated products, a firm must perform a series of activities. The different functions that perform each of these activities are called the firm's value chain."

"Like competences, endowments can be classified as core or noncore, depending on how central they are to a firm's business."

"Together, technological knowledge and market knowledge are the bedrock of capabilities."

"Suppliers, customers, complementary innovators, financiers, distributors, and any other entity that benefits from an innovation can also be a source of the innovation."

"The transmitter needs a certain level of delivery capacity. It must be capable of articulating what the innovation is all about."

"During the transfer, continued workshops in the challenges of cultural differences can help reduce the impedance mismatch between two firms."

"For a firm facing an innovation, understanding the rationale behind it may involve asking the question: can the new mousetrap be built using the new knowledge?"

"Of course, technological and market uncertainty are very related. The more a firm knows about what customers want, the better off it would be in making decisions on what should go into the product."

"A firm's ability to exploit an innovation is a function of the extent to which it owns scarce, difficult to imitate capabilities that are central to its value chain."

"Suppliers, customers, competitors, related industries, universities, public research laboratories, and the firm's internal value chain are all sources of innovation and therefore good places to look for potential co-opetitors."

"The bottom line is to collaborate if doing so increases the size of the pie, and then compete for your share of the pie."

"If a firm holds a near monopoly position in a product market, and knows that by investing in a drastic innovation it will accelerate the introduction time of the innovation, it may not want to invest, all else being equal."

"It takes combinations of block, run, and team-up strategies at different stages of the value chain and at different phases of the evolution of a product to maintain profitability."

"It takes more than R&D to innovate. It takes complementary assets, some of which are more likely to be undertaken only by government, given their public nature."

"The firm determines whether it will follow an offensive innovation strategy in which it is the first to introduce the innovation or follow a strategy in which it waits for others to go first."