The Process of Technological

Innovation

Successful commercialization &

continuous improvement
 Eight stages of technological
innovation
1. Basic research (for general nature laws)
2. Applied research (for specific problems)
3. Development (design for prototyping)
4. Engineering (design for assembly)
5. Manufacturing (design for efficiency & quality)
6. Marketing (design for acceptance & affordability)
7. Promotion (design for diffusion)
8. Improvement & enhancement (design for
sustainability)
 Corporate innovation process
 Concept formation
 Product concept definition
 Technical analysis
 Market research & analysis
 Industry analysis—SWOT & business strategy
 Commitment & support from strategic apex
 Development
 Market testing
 Manufacturing & marketing
 Promotion & selling
Chain-reaction of successful
innovation
 Scientific invention ←→
 Engineering development ←→
 Entrepreneurship ←→
 Management/strategy ←→
 Social demand ←→
 Fit environment
 Innovation trajectories
 Border crossings
 Inter-disciplines, -parties, -nations, -sectors
 Emergence of complex technologies
 Fit to and cause from diverse demands, perspectives,
approaches, contexts
 Age of knowledge and distributed intelligence, KDI
 Network of knowledge—Building and extending the
invisible college
 Learning and intelligent system—exploring the human
behavior
 Computing challenge—exploit the numeric barrier
 Innovation System
Concurrent Integration (Bordogna, 1999)
Analysis Synthesis
Reduction Integration

Innovation
Discovery of Wealth Creation Design
New Knowledge Manufacture
Sustainable Development
& Basic Laws Maintenance

Societal Needs T Capital Formation

The Public Good e & Investment
Natural Capital c
h
Devices n Ideas
Processes o
Systems l Information
o
g
y
 Creative transformation
 Searching for innovation requirement & change
demand
 Monitoring technological change &
organizational change
 Transformation for sustaining performance
 On internal structure of R&D, manufacturing
 On external market of customer, interested parties
 Successful process of innovation fulfillment
 Project management & management renew
 The Process of Creative
Destruction

Business leaders usually visualize a market

economy in the context of how capitalism
administers existing structures, whereas the
wiser approach is to understand how it
creates and destroys them.

Paraphrased from J. Schumpeter

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
Chapter VII, page 84
 Creative Transformations
The Schumpeterian Factor

 The interaction of technological innovation

with the competitive marketplace is the
fundamental driving force in capitalist
industrial progress. (Schumpeter, 1942)

 The normally healthy economy was not one

in equilibrium, but one that was constantly
being disrupted by technological innovation
(The Economist, Schumpeter, 1999)
 History of Xerography
 Market dissatisfaction for document reproduction even so cheap
and easy

 Scientific information
 Electrostatics, photoconductivity & photoreceptor, sensitization of Se
element
 Entrepreneur
 Carlson, Battelle, Wilson of Haloid
 Novelty—industry creation & user education
 Branding for new product—Xeros & graphein
Xerography and registered trademark “Xerox”
 History of Xerography (ii)
 1949, the pioneering copy machine, Xerox A
 User unfriendly, manually performed by the high-skilled
operators
 Unstable performance
 Enhancement & Market switching
 Target the lead user—lithographic plate printing
 Lease rather than sale—reduce the novelty risk of durable
goods
 1955, automatic version, CopyFlo
 1958, Xerox 914 for office users
 the two-part tariff leasing mechanism a successful
incentive for copying usage
 Nationwide retailing & service network
History of Xerography (iii)
 Scientific improvement
 New material for cheap and sensitive
photoreceptor: carbonic/organic polymer
 Evolution with laser & IC technology
 Integrated into computer industry
 Laser printer
 Lessons from Xerography
 Innovation success was determined by markets
eventually
 Breakthrough the diffusion constraints including
designing, technological, economic, political, societal,
and even religious factors
 Visionary enabler—entrepreneur & entrepreneurship
 Systemic improvement process—monitor the gap
and retest for objective
 Inter-disciplines—evolution with the sources of
innovation
 Luck blessed the risk lover and opportunity seizer
 A technological innovation
model
 The case of biomedical devices
 Concept formation—market pull or technological push
 Feasibility analysis—technological, economic, operational
 Product design and prototype development & testing
 Engineering & Manufacturing design—user interface, P/P
ratio, extensible/upgrade capability
 Meet the FDA requisites—the min. quality standard
 Production & quality control
 Marketing promotion—pricing strategy, technology cycle,
market structure, channel selection
 Customer satisfaction, post/disposal service
 Entrepreneur &
Entrepreneurship
 A technologist or marketer possessed with
 Vision, courage, initiative, concentration,
unbendingness, autonomy, ambition
 Appreciation, motivate himself and others, leadership
 The good sense of market rather than much more
invention
 Entrepreneur  enterprise
 Intre-preneurship incorporation
 The management renew cycle
 Entrepreneurship style of management for the
start-ups or in the emerging stage of industry
 Organic system for flexibility, effectiveness, and growth
 Professional management for institutionalization or
after the mature stage of industry
 Bureaucratic system for cost-benefit consideration &
efficiency criteria
 Renewing demand after structural rigidity and
industry decline
 Venture team
 Intrepreneurship
 Imagine the future product concept
 The gatekeeper of technology & market
 Plan enabler
 Project manager
 A stand alone research center
 Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
 Keep flexible and innovative
 Lessons from Xerox’s PARC
 Vision
 To be the future information architect and a documentation corporation
 Acquire SDS data processing

 Integrate xerography into computer office automation PC and WYSIWYG

interface, the Alto series
 Failure
 Asynchronous development between PARC and Xerox’s bureaucratic
structure
 Location dispersion & communication gap: New York state (E) vs. California
state (w)
 Too few product lines to fill market demand
 Competition from Japanese firm’s high quality copy machines—Canon,
Sharp, Minolta, etc. and the friendly innovation of add-on carbon cartridge
 Too concentrated on short-term financial performance to seize the
industry dynamics and growth opportunities
 Recovery of Xerox’s PARC
 Research on working process as well as new product
 Innovating anywhere and learning through
 Innovation transfer to the counterparts in the
organization beyond endeavoring to research
 Promote linkage between technology and market
 The always partner of research—customers
 To be a responsible profit center
 Share and broker information for entrepreneurship & new
start-ups
 Motivation incentive by being the Xerox shareholder
 The macro view of
technological innovation
 Appropriate context for innovation survival
 Complements, reformers & rebels
 Creative society
 Enjoy freedom without constraints
 Personal interest/survival rather than public new order
 Formal & informal club for information sharing
 Industrial cluster
 Specialization & cooperative linkage for production,
marketing, and international free trading
 Knowledge exploring & training
 Education & university
Lessons from Silicon Valley
 Vision of technology & life
 Knowledge center/window
 Facilitating context/infrastructure
 Venture capital
 Free mobility of job
 Weak-tie information network
 Continuous learning