'Corning Glass\r'

' lineament Studies Corning Glass lead postureting Corning Glass is a large, multinational memorial tablet knotted in glass and related to products with an increasing emphasis on full(prenominal)-value, scientificly- specialize products, galore(postnominal) of which are now part of joint-venture programmes and phylogenesiss. design ‘Claim to Fame’ This firm is another of the ‘ coke club’, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pi atomic number 53er in process construct enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, simply in the twentieth century moved into developments of specialized glasses which take with to a diversity of product/process inst exclusivelyation links.It has achieverfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its fondness products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter new and more(prenominal) difficult field in which it passel preserve competitive advantage. Its consistent investment funds in R&D has meant it has a ‘ engineering till’ into which it has been able to immerse apiece time the company has approach crisis. At first perhaps by accident but in more recent times as a function of strategicalal design, they piss reinforced a capability for reinventing themselves †moving from a glass throw offr to a roughageglass pi unityer to a give away fruit player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.How Do They bang trigger? Corning’s history is one of nonstop macrocosm, much of it around process, but one which is also punctuated by find flips into new and key areas. They have progressively come to function external partners legal transfer new and often very opposite cognition sets and have learnt to let go of their anterior assurance on doing it all in-house. Similarly they began life as a technology push company but some big mistakes, much(prenominal) as their expensive failure i n try to create a technology-driven grocery for self-propelled safety glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more market-linked administration.A key stage came in the 1980s when they legitimate that growth and increasing diversification of presentation options required that they system of rulesatize their approach to its focal point †prior to that it had been a classic finish of individual champions driving a technology system. They identified their ability to ‘dance’ as world key to their existence succeeder †that is, getting different and completing knowledge sets to come together around a new product concept and pervert it into reality at high animate once the encumbrance principle had been articulated. Innovation Strategy and LeadershipThe company has al elbow rooms held excogitation as a core strategic value, and they link this potently to generating and managing ingenious office †their knowledge bank. ‘What real ly matters for innovation … is continuous generation, management and deployment of intellectual property as a strategic asset’. This has been a boardroom issue on a number of occasions when the company has go about crisis †for example, when the market for television tubes declined and they were forced to make signifi send awayt cutbacks ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. om/college/tidd 1 Case Studies and changes †but it has helped them move forward each time into new technological and market fields . Their strategy until recently can be described as sousedly technologyled but there has been a pronounced shift in the late-twentieth century, first to a marketoriented approach and most recently to a network- cand model which sees key alliances as the way forward. A number of key strategic enablers are worth flagging: • unvarying support for 150 years for the core values of innovation through and through knowledge generation and application program Willingness to let go †to reinvent themselves by moving on from their proud heritage and into new fields • Consistent commitment to R&D funding †typically it has run amongst 8 and 10% ever since the asylum of the company when it was one of the first to set up an R&D laboratory . • The use of ‘deep dive’ sessions †fundamentally strategic review meetings where the role as well as direction of R&D within the organization is explored and through which a close integration in the midst of this strong resource and key application domains can be achieved.These sessions helped shift the concenter from a largely responsive, market-led business to one which was trying to set the ill-use through deploying key strategic technologies. Enabling the sue The company has a fairly ‘ bar’ process for steady state innovation †using a version of a stage gate model to funnel development ideas through a well-resourced system designed to generate customized solutions to particular market needs. This has worked well for them in their traditional markets where the pace of change is relatively slow and where the windbag within which product development takes place is cl primal defined.They have particularly acceptable links between product development and manufacturing with feedback into the design process †a key theme emerging out of their early presence as a strong player in process technology innovation. Their move into new markets and slight authorized product/market definitions has meant that they are now experimenting with different routes to managing the ‘do different’ innovation process. These include: • training with others †rather than trying to own all the resources, there has been a growing trend to network- and alliance-based product development.Their alert skill of being able to piece rapid response cross-functional teams has helped t hem in this process. • Learning from new networks †allied to this has been a crucial expansion of the selection environment in which they work, so that they explore much less familiar territory through their co-operation with a wide group of outside agencies in joint ventures and other collaborations. • Related to this has been their protracted use of technology sharing partnerships with major(ip) players which also had large but complementary R&D capabilities.Working with big players on complementary projects helps both partners move the bound forward quickly by being able to focus resources. ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 2 Case Studies Building an Innovative system • Emphasizing knowledge flows across the organization and creating structures to • • • • enable creative interchanges amongst them. Strong core value of quality and continuous improvement.Deliberate get down to cr eate communities of practice †enable backing up of differentmix teams to bring some variety into the knowledge ‘gene pool’. engagement of ‘storytelling’ as a mechanism to relieve oneself and communicate shared memory and ‘ corporate ingenuity’. Development of ‘flexible lively mass’ †the ability to quickly press key human resources on high priority projects. This is underpinned by the storytelling since this quickly and efficaciously communicates and shares ‘good practice’ around how such teams can quickly form and perform.Linkages and Networking Corning has been involved in many joint ventures of a significant scale and their learning from these has led to a growing emphasis on actively building links as a key innovation strategy. They have a long tradition of R&D networking and co-operation †for example, much of their competence base in photonics arose out of close networks and collaborations make with institutes in the former Soviet legal jointure which contained excellent science but lacked resources and plan of attack to development facilities.Reflection on the sources of their innovation success have led them to extend their ‘ realistic’ global laboratory and they have develop sophisticated ship canal of harvesting intellectual property from such collaborations without taking oer or compromising the autonomy and independency of the laboratories and institutes with which they work. Learning and Capability Development A key development has been in the use of storytelling and other approaches to try and recapture the earlier strengths of the company which had, to some extent, been lost in the later part of the twentieth century.It provides an accepted and widely-used mechanism to ‘recapture grounded experience in the company itself’ †rather than have reliance on ‘best practice’ or other prescriptions delivered from outside . For more on Corning and the ways in which it manages innovation see M. whole meal flour and A. Shuldiner, Corning and the Craft of Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 3\r\n'