Corning Glass

Case Studies Corning Glass reach Corning Glass is a large, multinational organization involved in ice rink and related proceedss with an increasing emphasis on high-value, technologic totallyy-specialized carrefours, many of which are right off donation of joint-venture programmes and maturements. Innovation Claim to Fame This firm is an separate of the 100 confederation, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pi unrivaleder in process understructure enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, unless in the twentieth century move into developments of specialized glasses which led finished to a variety of product/process pattern links.It has successfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its core products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter y tabuhful and much(prenominal) difficult fields in which it can preserve competitive advantage. Its accordant investment in R&D has meant it has a technology money box into which it has been able to dip each time the high society has faced crisis. At first perhaps by accident but in more recent times as a function of strategical design, they grow built a capability for reinventing themselves pathetic from a glass obligater to a fiberglass pioneer to a report player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.How Do They Manage Innovation? Cornings history is one of continuous grounding, much of it nigh process, but one which is withal punctuated by breakthrough shifts into smart and key areas. They have increasingly come to wont external partners bringing new and often very different intimacy sets and have learnt to let go of their earlier reliance on doing it all in-house. Similarly they began life as a technology push caller-up but several(prenominal) big mistakes, such as their expensive trial in trying to create a technology-driven market for automotive gumshoe glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more m arket-linked organization.A key stage came in the 1980s when they recognized that growth and increasing diversification of foundation garment options required that they systematize their approach to its management prior to that it had been a classic culture of individual champions driving a technology system. They determine their ability to dance as creation key to their innovation success that is, getting different and complementary knowledge sets to come together around a new product concept and turn it into reality at high speed once the core principle had been articulated. Innovation system and LeadershipThe smart set has alship canal held innovation as a core strategic value, and they link this tightly to generating and managing intellectual property their knowledge bank. What really matters for innovation is continuous generation, management and deployment of intellectual property as a strategic asset. This has been a boardroom issue on a human action of occasions when the company has faced crisis for example, when the market for television tubes declined and they were forced to make profound 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 strongly technologyled but in that respect has been a marked shift in the late-twentieth century, first to a marketoriented approach and most recently to a network-based model which fascinates key alliances as the way forward. A number of key strategic enablers are outlay flagging Consistent support for 150 years for the core set of innovation through knowledge generation and application 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 between 8 and 10% ever since the founding of the company when it was one of the first to set up an R&D science laboratory . The use of deep dive sessions essentially strategic review meetings where the case as well as direction of R&D deep down the organization is explored and through which a close integration between this strong resource and key application domains can be achieved.These sessions helped shift the instruction from a largely responsive, market-led business to one which was trying to set the tempo through deploying key strategic technologies. Enabling the Process The company has a fairly standard process for steady state innovation development a version of a stage gate model to displace development ideas through a well-resourced system designed to generate customized solutions to crabby market needs. This has worked well for them in their traditional markets where the pace of change is relatively slow and where the envelope within which product development takes place is intelligibly defined.They have pa rticularly good 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 less certain product/market definitions has meant that they are now experimenting with different routes to managing the do different innovation process. These include Learning with others rather than trying to own all the resources, there has been a growing trend to network- and alliance-based product development.Their existing skill of being able to configure rapid response cross-functional teams has helped them in this process. Learning from new networks allied to this has been a significant 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 pr evailed use of technology sharing partnerships with major players which also had large but complementary R&D capabilities.Working with big players on complementary projects helps both partners move the frontier forward readily by being able to focus resources. 2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 2 Case Studies create an Innovative Organization 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 to create communities of practice enable setting up of differentmix teams to bring some variety into the knowledge gene pool. Use of storytelling as a mechanism to build and communicate shared memory and collective adroitness. Development of flexible critical mass the ability to promptly tighten key human resources on high priority projects. This is underpinned by the storytelling since this quickly a nd effectively 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 made with institutes in the former Soviet Union which contained excellent science but lacked resources and get at to development facilities.Reflection on the sources of their innovation success have led them to extend their virtual global laboratory and they have developed sophisticated ways of harvesting intellectual property from such collaborations without taking over or compromising the autonomy and independence 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 retake 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. Graham 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