Jun Watanabe
So now we are at week 3 which is about how innovations actually happen. Basically there are two basic ways to come up with innovation one is incremental the other one is radical. Incremental innovation has several points. First, the main focus is to improve existing products or services. This leads to increase competitiveness in markets and low uncertainty. Whereas radical innovation explores new technology which is completely new to company as well as to the world that not such a product is still out there. It can be risky because there are not enough data about this new product so it might cause unexpected accidents. Moreover it creates a drastic change that alters an existing product into the new product.
For example, Amazon.com is an online shopping website where you can order many items cheaper compared to other shops which physically exist. Let’s pick books for instance. Because Amazon.com has so many types of books even more than an ordinal bookstore with lower price, traditional book stores were gone. Likewise radical innovation can be beneficial for consumers. Another example would be digital photography. The previous generation was photographic film. You needed to go to a photo shop in order to get your pictures because the process of making pictures was much more complicated compared to digital one. In 1990s, digital camera came out people could just organize their pictures by themselves by using a printer, editing and etc. In point of consumer view, Amazon.com and digital photography are just like tools which are given from angel that made their life much more convenient than before. How about the older technology? The answer is simple. Who would use old technology if they are troublesome to use? Maybe people who are grown up with them might have hard time to switch to new technology because they just like using old ones but the percentage of those people are low.
How about people who are selling or developing old technology? Those people who are working in bookstores have lost their job because of radical innovation. Those people who are working in photo shops to make pictures from films also went bankrupted because they lost many customers suddenly. It can be both a devil and an angel depends on your position. That’s a life it can happen. It’s all about capitalism. It is significant to come up with something innovative to keep existing in market these days. Life normally does not go the way you want so you just have to deal with it and do your best.