“Innovations in business - how to be ahead of competitors in reacting to market trends?”
Yesterday, besides my normal lectures (on International Politics and EU Policies), I had an opportunity to attend a panel discussion:
“Innovations in business - how to be ahead of competitors in reacting to market trends?”
At the email I received some days ago was also written:
“Why it is worth coming? The debate is a unique chance to contrast our vision of fast changing market with experiences of top managers and try to answer vital questions of today business: How to distinguish between crucial changes and vagaries of fashion? How to react more effectively then competitors? How to maintain flexibility of a giant company?”
The talk was quite interesting, although went beyond the innovation topic. It was held by two of the best professors at SGH plus a young lady, working at Johnson&Johnson.
Below are some of my notes:
–> Before talking about innovations as something that enhance the success of a company we should first try to answer questions like “What is success?”, “How we could measure it?” etc. /the conclusion was that there`s no a single definition and it has different meaning for different companies/
–> Companies should try not to look good in market but to be good in it
–> One decides to invest at certain activity in case the latter would bring him/her value more than elsewhere
–> Market share it s not good enough indicator in terms of measuring success of a company (what would bring you growing market share in a dying market?)
–> There’s no a single definition for value creation (it differs for owners/stakeholders/shareholders; in ST or LT etc)
–> Innovations usually are not successful from the very beginning. Change requires learning. The question is how long should your patience last?
–> ST indicators are easy to be manipulated
–> Innovation could be started in order to catch up our competitors or to surpass them
–> Nowadays innovation is a “big world” in all companies, but usually most of the innovation ideas are too expensive to be implemented
–> The smallest innovations brings the most profit
–> Innovation means always risk. Most of the innovative products don’t bring success (profit) but help the growth of the “old ones”.
–> Innovations should be at first place at IT solutions. The problem is that most of the companies treat IT solutions as cost instead of value enhancing tools
–> Innovations are not only at portfolio level- distribution, delivery, information system etc
–> A good manager should be able to identify trends
–> Corporate culture could be seen as a competitive advantage for companies (“something that could not be copy, at least not easily”). It `s not equal to bonus system 
It`s intangible. It helps attracting same kind of individuals. It’s also something that employee could not understand, explain etc, just feel, being a part of.
–> Nowadays the relation with a customer could be much more important than the product itself.
