Innovation can be defined as new ideas that a company incorporates to meet the requirements and standards of the consumer market in order to bolster both their economic interests and the growth of the company while maintaining good relations with the consumer. Depending on the type of company and their market targets, the company can approach can handle innovation in different ways to meet its set objectives. Color Kinetics Incorporated as a company can focus on different approaches to innovation such as sustaining innovation, breakthrough innovation and disruptive innovation. In addition to relevant frameworks in place that help the innovation team accomplish their set objectives, CKI should have innovation strategies relevant to what the company offers the consumer. (Ionescu&Dumitru, 2015)
Setting its sight on being a major player in the world of digital lighting industry, CKI should aim its sight to innovations that not only creates profit for the company, but also to ones that would enable the company tap into the new niche markets. Such kind of approach is the sustaining innovation, where the company defines a set of problems for new innovations and works on a way of how to solve them. When done right, sustaining innovation is assured to bring profits to the company in the near future.
However, with each innovation a company takes, a mammoth of challenges that the company needs to overcome awaits them. Such challenges in relation to Color Kinetics Incorporated include poor planning, lack of diversity, missed connection with customers, lack of an innovation strategy, wrong approach to innovation, bureaucracy, short term investment goals and company location. As in the case of Kodak, which at its prime was a major player in the imaging industry, wrong decisions by the management team led to the decline of a once great company. CKI should learn from Kodak and ensure their management team are well informed on the current trajectories of technological development so as to ensure all their innovations are relevant to the current consumer needs.
Christensen’s Innovation Dilemma tends to explain how embracing of new technologies causes great firms to fail. When a company wants to explore a new niche in the market, it is important to do extensive research and consider factors that ultimately lead to the success or failure of a business idea.As with the case of Kodak mini which tried to embrace disruptive innovation in the form of introduction of new products that attempted to embrace a new market with the hopes of increasing its shared value network. Disruptive technologies tend to be an advancement of what the company offers and many a times when a company fails to implement such innovation strategies, its is always left behind in innovation. This is what Kodak trid to embrace after years of stunted growth due to poor innovations.
So as to ensure the innovation succeeds, the management should formulate a strategic plan that incorporates the following aspects : competency, strategy and effective management. Competency being an important aspect as seen in the Kodak mini case where the company had a long and successful history producing specific products hence trying to change their line of products suddenly was not a good management idea as it disrupted its market.
In as much as disruptive technologies can cause future gains, this is not normally certain. A company like CKI should embrace innovation tended towards disruptive technology yet inorder to avoid failure, it should maintain its current product line and implement the new idea in phases into the new market.If the idea fails, it should be scrapped down but when it succeeds, it should be adopted fully into the market. Kodak mini was an industry giant at its height and the management team had initially sets its sight on embracing the digital platform. Yet the reluctance of the management to embrace the new wave of digtital technology left the company behind in innovation after other digital industry heavy weights had already embraced the new wave. Only through creation of a strategical and innovative management team could Kodak mini have stopped the new wave by creation of a better product that rivalled that of the digital platform.
Disruptive technology is not guaranteed to work but failure of a company to embrace disruptive technology eventuallt leads to their downfall. With this in mind, CKI implement a strategy combines sustaining innovation of current products while also conducting research on disruptive technology so as not to be left behind in the new wave of technological advancement.
The business model of a company is mainly the way a company generates income and profit from the activities done within the business(Ovans, 2015). Initially CKI was able to maintain its relevant in the world of digital lighting industry CKI was able to implement a business model that enabled it to tap favorably into the consumer market and make profits. However, with the rapid increase in technological advancements, CKI should reevaluate their business model in order to account for all the changes in the technological landscape. Only by doing so can CKI aim to maintain the growth of its current value network.
With the current trends in market and technological innovations, the future at CKI should tend towards a business model that embraces reinvention and change. For many years CKI has created a stable platform in the digital lighting industry that maintained its value network, however, all companies need to evolve to avoid being redundant. The advent of the technological age has brought about amazing technological inventions with one being the use of LED technology in the digital industry. Only through creating an adaptable business models can CKI aim to maintain its relevance in the industry. This can be accomplished in many ways with one being tapping directly into the consumer market, use of the crossing chasm concept (Moore, 1999)and embracing cost effective method of production that makes their products easy to acquire yet still maintaining the quality of design.
With each business model or innovation that a business implements, there can be different reactions that initially expected, the business model can become successful or it can plummet and create financial problems for the company. This however does not mean that innovation as part of an adaptable business model is dangerous to a company needs. It only underlines the fact that companies should be prepared for all the challenges that accompany innovation and change in business models.
References
Ionescu, A. &Dumitru, N. (2015). The role of innovation in creating the company’s competitive advantage. Ecoforum, 4(1).
Ovans, A. (2015). What Is a Business Model?. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 19 August 2016, from https://hbr.org/2015/01/what-is-a-business-model
Moore, G. (1999). Crossing the chasm (1st Ed.). New York: HarperBusiness
