Matching Typology of innovations to different emerging business situations

Abstract

Matching product, process or strategy innovation strategies to the emerging exogenous or endogenous business situations minimises a firm’s vulnerability in the wake of the increasingly more precarious business world. However, it is often the mismatch between such strategies which is often a major hurdle of most of the contemporary businesses. To address such innovation strategy mismatches, it is argued in this conceptual paper that it is not only synchronisation of product innovation with relevant process and strategy innovation strategies that would leverage a firm’s superior market performance, but also matching relevant product, process and strategy innovation strategies to the diagnosed exogenous and endogenous business situations. In exogenous business situations characterised by intense industry rivalries or market saturation, the application of a combination of product and strategy innovation strategies would enable a business avoid vulnerability to the increasing spate of destructive rivalries by creating new products to tape opportunities in new markets and render irrelevant the competition in the existing markets. However, in cases of frequent sporadic destructive competitors’ actions causing proliferation of enormous disruptive innovations, the use of a combination of product, process and strategy innovation strategies would enable a business create superior value offerings in conjunction with gaming-motivated cooperation and strategic alliances with rivals to recreate the existing industry conditions and circumstances to its advantages. That contrasts with the circumstances where a business is experiencing significant shifts in customer tastes and preferences. In such situations, the use of product and strategy innovation strategies would integrate new value offerings in the existing products to reverse the shifts in customer tastes and preferences. However, in endogenous situations, quests for growth would require the use of a combination of product, process and strategy innovation strategies as contrasted with cases of quests for costs’ minimisation where only the use of process and strategy innovation strategies would be required. It also contrasts with differentiation quests where only product and process innovation strategies would be critical for aiding a firm to achieve its business credo.