Importance Of Product Innovation

986 Words4 Pages
The Oxford Dictionary describes innovation as the process of “mak[ing] changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. According to the OECD Oslo Manual, “innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations”. The word implementation plays a key role in order to determine what is innovative and what is not. For example, a new product can be considered an innovation only after being implemented, which means introduced for the first time in the market. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, considered by Richard Nelson and Sydney Winter as…show more content…
A product or service must be completely new or “significantly improved with respect to its characteristics or intended uses”, in order to be considered as an innovation by OECD. In 1984, Motorola Inc. launched its DynaTAC 8000x, the first mobile phone available to customers. As Jon Angars reports in his book “Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone”, this first mobile phone can hardly be considered as instantaneous success, mainly due to its weight, slightly less than a pack of sugar, and its cost, nevertheless we can think to mobile phones as a breakthrough and as a clear example of product innovation. Process innovation is defined as the market introduction of a new or significantly improved production method. For example, the very first introduction of productivity software bundles in the early 90s drastically improved the efficiency of firms all around the world, allowing people to easily manage huge amounts of documents and…show more content…
In the mid-1940s, Tahiichi Ohno, production engineer for Toyota Motors in Japan, introduced for the first time in Toyota what is called Toyota Production Systems or TPS, a set of business practices aimed to create a just-in-time production in order to reduce waste and inventory costs (Taiichi Ohno, 1978). TPS can be considered a valid example of organizational innovation. Now that the concept of innovation is more clear, it seems important to draw the distinction between innovation and invention. In everyday language, the word innovation is in use, partially or totally, as a synonym for invention, even though the two words have a subtle but different meaning. The difference lies in the fact that innovation deals with the introduction and commercialization of a novelty inside the market, whereas invention deals with the creation or design of a novelty (Balalaeva 2012). Some interpreters of Schumpeter’s work saw a nexus of linear causality between the two concepts, even though Schumpeter himself was aware that many inventions do not necessarily become innovation and that innovation does not always stem from inventions (Godin,
Open Document