Riassunto Entrepreneurship

Innovation is not technology

Innovation includes organisational and market change. Technology is not the same as R&D; it includes engineering, production, suppliers, and users. Entrepreneurial innovations are the key driver of economic growth. Competition among market participants leads to a desire to seek new ways to improve technology, new ways to do business, and other types of advantages that would increase profit margins and directly impact the entrepreneur’s standard of living.

What is innovation?

Companies achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. They approach innovation in its broadest sense, including both new technologies and new ways of doing things. Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or service. The industrial innovation process includes technical, design, production, management, and marketing activities involved in the commercialization of a new (or improvement of a) product or the usage of a new (or improved) process.

Models of innovation

The third model emphasizes the interaction of market needs and new technology but was only for closer phases. The fourth model involves interactivity among the phases that consider feedback during all phases of the innovation process, creating an innovation environment. The fifth model focuses on strategic customers and strategic suppliers.

Innovation definition

• Phases of innovation process
• Outcome of innovation process
• Degree of novelty: radical innovation vs incremental innovation
• Scope of the innovation: architectural vs component
• Product Innovation (changes in what is offered) vs Process innovation (changes in how it is offered)

Dangers of partial views of innovation

• Strong R&D leading to Technology-push which fails to meet customer needs
• Market needs leading to reactive strategies, lack of technical progression, and incremental innovation
• Key individuals may demotivate and/or fail to exploit other staff know-how
• Internally generated opportunities (e.g., core competencies) may fail to identify and exploit external opportunities ("not invented here syndrome")
• Externally generated opportunities (e.g., alliances) leading to reactive strategies, little internal learning, and failure to develop distinctive competencies

Factors affecting the innovating process

• Sector: structure, constraints, opportunities, and rate of change
• Technology: maturity and rate of change
• Size of organization: resources available
• Location: national policy (systems of innovation)

How to learn from the market

• Inquiry, empathic design, creating new markets

Innovation life cycle 1

• Fluid Phase: product innovations (performance-maximizing), uncoordinated process, experimentation
• Transition phase: emergence of a dominant design signaling an industry shake-out and a shift in focus to high volumes (sales-maximizing) and low-cost production
• Specific: product innovation rate declines; focus on low-cost strategy, higher volumes, and production capacity

Innovation life cycle 2

Typologies of customers

• Customers who generate profit
• Customers who will generate sales growth
• Customers who allow the accumulation of invisible assets

Maturity vs Customer base

Creating new markets involves market experimentation, scenarios, and extrapolation of trends:

• Explore implications of a range of possible trends
• Ensure broad participation and information channels of communication
• Encourage multiple sources, debate, and constructive skepticism
• Be prepared to change strategy in light of new and unexpected evidence

Scenario development

• Assess relevant context
• Identify critical indicators
• Determine behavior of indicators
• Identify key feature events likely to affect indicators
• Construct best, worst, and likely scenarios

Essential element of a forecast

• Quantitative factors (specific measure)
• Qualitative factors (scope of forecast)
• Time frame
• Probability
• Assumptions made

Criteria for choice of forecasting method

• Organization’s planning horizon
• Rate of environmental change
• Availability of information
• Availability of resources
• Competence and willingness of managers

Delphi Method

• Survey of expert opinion
• Analyze response
• Re-survey with feedback on the first survey
• Note any convergence or divergence
• Repeat process as necessary or possible

Lean Startup

A startup is a temporary organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. A business model describes ...