Achieving Innovation Leadership and Competitive Advantage

We are living at a time of great changes in which walls are falling down under the great pressure of globalization, and today's environment driven by fast-paced technological changes. At the same time in terms of accommodation with this new era, fundamental changes consecutively have been taking place in production and manufacturing processes and hence consequently several structural evolutions have been witnessed in the structure of complex product industries as well as in the structure of organizations. These aforementioned changes have led to the acceleration of the process of competitive confrontation among industrial companies or in other words outburst of the competitive challenge in our global world.

Blomqvist et al. (2004) underline the fact that ‘… change creates incentives for innovation and entrepreneurs seeking opportunities’. In this sense in today’s world it should be acknowledged that being innovative has emerged as crucial pattern in order to cope with these aforementioned challenges more than ever. Albeit the industrial companies are highly stimulated and striving to capture the notion to survive and prosper in this new era, often lack the necessary resources. Chesbrough (2007a, 24) underlines the latter; he states that ‘as a result of both trends — rising development costs and shorter product life cycles — companies are finding it increasingly difficult to justify investments in innovation’. It is therefore important for industrial companies to broaden their views and look for alternative ways of getting innovative information and ideas in addition to the traditional ways or past models. Thereby the industrial companies will be able to keep up with the innovation competition to get a sustainable growth and to respond effectively, rapidly and less costly on the market. Apart from the fact mentioned above; Pérez and Sánchez (2003, 823) claims that small “hi-tech” firms can have a ‘catalyzing role to technology’.

Nevertheless, progressively industrial companies have started to comprehend the importance and necessity of networking and knowledge sharing towards this way. The coming age will be the age of collaboration. According to Van der Meer (2007), by forming and setting up champions, task forces, venture teams, skunk works, spinoffs, enabling acquisitions, spin-ins, venture capital, licensing, innovative budgets, partnering, listening posts etc., industrial companies will be able to create a strong business network and cooperate with specialized companies, universities and research laboratories in order to gain and conceptualize knowledge and innovative ideas. As captured by a number of authors (Chesbrough, 2007; Harryson, 2006; Sawhney, 2002; Zaheer and Bell, 2005), firms in various ways should tap into the potential of external sources to acquire new knowledge to be utilized in successful innovations. Though that is where the challenge has kicked off in how to identify such knowledge and then successfully transform this externally acquired knowledge into innovation.


References

• Blomqvist, K., Hara, V., Koivuniemi, J. and Aijo, T. (2004) ‘Towards Networked R&D Management: the R&D approach of Sonera Corporation as an example’, R&D Management, Vol. 34, No. 5, pp. 591-603.



• Chesbrough, H. (2007a) ‘Why Companies Should Have Open Business Models’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 22-28.



• Harryson, S.J. (2006) Know-Who Based Entrepreneurship: From Knowledge Creation to Business Implementation, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.



• Pérez, M. P. and Sánchez, A.M. (2003) ‘The development of university spin-offs: early dynamics of technology transfer and networking’, Technovation, Vol. 23, No. 10, pp. 823-831.



• Sawhney, M. (2002) ‘Managing Business Innovation: An Advanced Business Analysis’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 24-26.



• Van Der Meer, H. (2007) ‘The Dutch Treat: Challenges in thinking in business models’, Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 192-202.



• Zaheer, A. and Bell, G. (2005) ‘Benefiting from network position: firm capabilities, structural holes, and performance’, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 26, No. 9, pp. 809-825.