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Mastering the dynamics of innovation
Innovation in industry is a process that involves an enormous amount of uncertainty, human creativity, and chance. It takes place in small and large ways, and in some times and some places more than in others. Over the years, scholars have observed patterns of successful industrial innovation, but the identificatiollhof patterns does not suggest that successful innovation is entirely predictable. These patterns do, however, indicate that relationships exist between product and process changes, the state of evolution of an industry, and the competitive climate faced by individual firms. Understanding these relationships is crucial, both to the scholar, who seeks keys to the general behavior of firms and their abilities to innovate, and to the practicing manager, whose mission is to plan and act. This book attempts to develop a practical model of the dynamics of industrial innovation-a model with explanatory power for the scholar, and action ideas for the manager. Clearly, this model will not be generalizable to all settings, industries, cultures, and times. Like all attempts to explain behavior, it is a creature of its sources, which in this case are the American industrial experience of the past 150 years, with a smattering of evidence from Europe and Japan. It also draws primarily on products for which cost and product performance are the commanding factors, rather than those for which fashion, novelty, or advertising a~e important competitive variables. Within these limits, however, it should be readily apparent to the reader that innovation is conditioned by a firm's competitive environment, technology, organization, and conscious strategic choices. Every attempt has been made to clarify the implications of the model for the practicing manager. ORIGINS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like all books, this one was much longer in the making than in the writing, and'is the outcome of many influences. Years ago, Professor Donald Marquis and I discussed an outline for a wideranging review of work on innovation and the management of technology. Although our work was cut short by Don Marquis' untimely death, we pursued differences between types of innovations, products, and processes, and differences in patterns of innovation among different industrial sectors. We concluded that firms persisted in particular types of innovation, and that there were striking differences between firms and between technologies and . sectors. At the time, little was known and less could be stated to explain these differences. Further research on innovation was required to develop an operational model to account for interfirm and interindustry differences. I began to develop such a model by looking at differences in product innovation among firms and industries and attempting to relate those differences to firms' explicit competitive strategies for growth and competition. I expected to find that firms which focused on customer perception of product performance would emphasize product innovation, while those focusing on cost and quality would emphasize process innovation. This endeavor was largely fruitless until 1974, when I had the good fortune to meet Professor William Abernathy, who was beginning his work on the dynamics of innovation in the production process and its relationship to product innovation. We immediately saw that together we had the elements of understanding a complex set of relationships linking a firm's products and process technologies to its competitive environment and organizational structure. We continued to develop this dynamic theory of innovation, which was reported in his book, The Productivity Dilemma. I was also influenced and encouraged by another Harvard colleague, Richard S. Rosenbloom. He stressed the importance of understanding differences between groups of cOll)peting firms in the process of innovation. Professor Rosenbloom arranged for me to teach his seminar at.the Harvard Business School for two years as visiting associate professor. Lacking that opportunity and his generous and continuous encouragement, I doubt if this project would have been staited"much less completed in its current guise. Most important, the position at Harvard gave Bill Abernathy and me the chance to work together while our ideas were in their formative stages. When I left Harvard for a full-time position at MIT, I was fortunate to receive half-time research support for two years from the National Science Foundation to start gathering the industry cases that form the basis of this work.! Dr. Alden Bean, who was then head of the NSF's Policy Research and Analysis Division, Dr. William Hetzner, and later Dr. David Roessner, who served as project monitors, provided many ideas and much helpful criticism as well as personal encouragement to me. In 1983 the project was interrupted by a long period of administrative service to MIT when I was given assignments to head a laboratory of the School of Engineering, a major research project, and then the Industrial Liaison Program. I have been fortunate that, on my return to full-time teaching and research in 1989, the new Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT awarded me a term chair that afforded the chance to pick up the research and writing tasks that finally resulted in this work. I also appreciate help granted by MIT's new International Center for Research in the Management of Technology for support needed by Dr. Suarez for the completion of Chapter 2. Most important, over my years at MIT three close colleagues, the late Professor J., Herbert Hollomon, Professor Edward Roberts, and Professor Tom Allen have provided constant encouragement and help, without which I certainly would not have persisted in the work. Dr. Linsu Kim worked extensively with me in the early stages of the project that led to this book. He classified a number of discontinuous innovations in the framework of hypotheses now seen in Chapter 9, and also wrote a paper, not included here, on the evolution of technology in the civil aircraft industry. Teresa Costanza Nolet, under my guidance, analyzed first the flat glass industry, starting with Scoville's seminal work, and later the rayon industry, working mainly from primary sources. Dr. Fernando Suarez helped develop Chapter 2 by expanding my original observations on the automobile, calculator, and transis,tor industries to the other industries covered. Doctors Andre Ghirardi, Paul Horwitz, and Jinjoo Lee, each working under my direction, pro- vide'd analyses of the evolution of products and processes in the electrical equipment, machine tool, and synthetic rubber industries, respectively. These cases were helpful in developing the ideas set out here, but again were? not included owing to the need for brevity. Prof. James R. Bright first introduced me to the early MIT studies of innovations and provided many helpful comments. Later, I was fortunate to encounter a book by Professor Burton Klein, entitled Dynamic Economics. Klein was pursuing answers to the same questions but from a much different perspective. Looking at aggregates of firms competing in an industry, he reached conclusions that were remarkably consistent with those that Bill Abernathy and I were reaching. He provided a number of helpful comments with respect to the need to understand the implications of our work for the renewal of large, established corporations. Al Lehnerd, currently with SteeICase, provided the details of the Black & Decker experience with modular portable power tool designs from his time there as leader of the project as well as much helpful commentary on the model developed in the introduction and Chapter 4. John Rydz generously checked his notes and records from his years at RCA to provide details on the cases of televisions and television picture tubes as given in Chapter 2. He also provided many helpful comments on tile topic of innovation as a basis for corporate renewal. Dr. George White gave a vivid firsthand account of his experiences at Xerox and a valuable critique of the concept of a dominant design in Chapter 2. Dr. Jacob Goldman, who as vice president of research, development, and engineering at Xerox founded its Palo Alto Research Center, provided valuable commentary on that experience as well as valuable ideas related to many of the themes in this book. Dr. Henry Montrey wrote his masters thesis, on the case of oriented strand board replacing plywood, at MIT under my guidance. Similarly Allan Afuah analyzed the case of the massively parallel supercomputer challenging von Neumann designs, while Hidetaka Kai described and analyzed the personal computer industry. I thank each of them for the use of ideas and materials from their research. Dr. Dennis Oliver introduced me to the Pilkington Corporation and to Sir Alastair Pilkington. He not only arranged a tour of the then most modern float glass plant in Europe, but also generously shared his own knowledge of its development as well as comments on Chapter 5. Professor Clayton Christensen was extremely helpful in allowing me to use and re-analyze material from his doctoral dissertation on the rigid disk drive industry, and thoughtful in providing comments not only on that case but also on the entire manuscript. Professor Robert Stobaugh kindly gave permission to use ideas and data from his ground-breaking book on innovation in the petrochemical industry in Chapter 6 and offered me much personal ? support and encouragement. Professor JoAnne Yates helped with materials and comments on Chapter 1. Professor Michael Rappa generously helped me with the design of the manuscript sent out for reviewers' comments and, in particular, drawing many of the figures. Professor Michael Thshman has been familiar with this work from its beginning, first as a student in the doctoral seminar that I taught with Bill Abern~thy at the Harvard Business School in 1975. Later, when my intention was to publish the work as part of the series edited by Thshman and Professor Andrew Van de Ven, he provided extensive comments on the original manuscript. Tushman and his associate Philip Anderson have built on my ideas, integrating them with the broader theory available in the social sciences, and, more recently, extending Nolet's and my analyses of innovation in the glass and rayon industries to the cases of glass containers, cement, and minicomputers. I have in turn benefited from their insights. Van de Ven also provided an extensive review of the current manuscript as did Professor Donald Frey, each from a different perspective, for which I am most grateful. . During the past two years Professors Richard Rosenbloom arid Richard Nelson provided welcome opportunities for me to present the work at their Sloan Foundation Seminars at Harvard . JJniversity and Columbia, respectively, as well as written reviews helpful personal comments which have greatly improved the ?Wc:wk. Professor Bengt Arne Vedin gave me an amazingly detailed ''''''.~L''':IULV of the manuscript, in particular of Chapter 8, based on his )~X.tc:!tlsjv'e knowledge of the photographic industry, which helped add' many ideas as well as correct some errors and inconsisChris Freeman of the Science Policy Research Unit lt~StiS1;ex U nlivrofessors Keith Rothwell, and Will Walker. Professor Will Mitchell }(yrht:v'llUabl.e suggestions during a seminar at the University of Michigan, as did Professor Steven Klepper of Carnegie-Mellon. Klepper also sent me an extensive and helpful technical review. While I have tried to take all of their comments into account, I have not been able to do so in all cases, and any errors in the final text are my own. When I agreed to publish this work through the Harvard Business School Press I had the great good fortune to have Richard Luecke as its editor. In many respects Luecke should be credited as co-author, as he constantly argued for brevity and clarity. He gathered additional research materials for all of the cases and checked facts and data for me. We debated and rewrote each of the chapters for clarity and consistency. His hand is particularly evident in Chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 8. Finally, 'Carol Franco, as acquisitions editor for the Harvard Business School Press, helped me believe from the beginning that there really was a book, a story worth telling in my work. She kept the final goal in view even when reviewers' comments were occasionally discouraging and during the long periods when I was caught up in administrative assignments. I thank all of these friends, especially Dick and Carol, for their unstinting help and encouragement. This book is dedicated to the memory of William J. Abernathy. To the very end of his life Abernathy's concern was with his family and colleagues, and with scholarship having the potential to make industry more productive and innovative. Typically Bill helped the rest of us see things in new ways, to widen our vision. He was able to bring disparate, sometimes contradictory, facts together to reveal fresh insights and relationships. His many original ideas set the stage for research that has led us to a deeper and more powerful structure for thinking about and managing industrial innovation. No one book could possibly build on all of Bill's many important contributions, but I am deeply grateful for the help he gave me in starting this project. I hope that in it I have managed to capture some of his creative insights as well as my own and to make them fresh and clear for others..NULL.NULL
Ketersediaan
| Call Number | Location | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Tan 658.406 Utt m | PSB lt.dasar - Pascasarjana | 2 |
| Penerbit | Boston Harvard Business School Press., 1994 |
|---|---|
| Edisi | - |
| Subjek | Strategic planning Management Organizational change Industrial management |
| ISBN/ISSN | 9780875847405 |
| Klasifikasi | NONE |
| Deskripsi Fisik | xxix, 253 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Info Detail Spesifik | - |
| Other Version/Related | Tidak tersedia versi lain |
| Lampiran Berkas | Tidak Ada Data |