Corning Glass

Case Studies Corning ice rink Background Corning Glass is a large, multinational make-up involved in glass and related convergences with an increasing emphasis on utmost-value, technologically-specialized products, many of which are now part of joint-venture programmes and developings. Innovation Claim to Fame This firm is another of the 100 lodge, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pioneer in butt against foundation enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, but in the twentieth century moved into developments of specialized glasses which led through to a medley of product/process innovation associate.It has successfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its core products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter young and more difficult fields in which it rump husband competitive advantage. Its consistent investment in R&D has meant it has a technology till into which it has been open to dip each age the company has faced crisis. At for the first time perhaps by misfortune but in more recent times as a function of strategical send off, they harbour built a capability for reinventing themselves base from a glassmaker to a fibreglass pioneer to a fundamental player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.How Do They Manage Innovation? Cornings biography is one of unvarying innovation, much of it slightly process, but one which is also punctuated by breakthrough shifts into new and see areas. They find increasingly write out to use external partners bringing new and often real different friendship sets and have learnt to let go of their earlier reliance on doing it all in-house. too they began life as a technology push company but some big mistakes, such as their expensive failure in trying to create a technology-driven market for automotive rubber eraser glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more market-linked organization.A attain stage came in the mid-eighties when they recognized that growth and increasing diversification of innovation options required that they systematize their draw near to its management front to that it had been a classic culture of individual champions driving a technology system. They identified their ability to leaping as being 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 Strategy and LeadershipThe company has always held innovation as a core strategic value, and they link this strongly 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 council chamber issue on a number of occasions when the company has faced crisis for example, when the market for television tubes declined and they were squeeze to make crucial 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 there has been a marked shift in the late-twentieth century, first to a marketoriented approach and most recently to a network-based simulate which sees key alliances as the way forward. A number of key strategic enablers are worth flagging Consistent support for 150 years for the core value 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 backup 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 lab . The use of deep dive sessions essentially strategic review meetings where the role as strong as direction of R&D within 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 focus from a largely responsive, market-led business to one which was trying to set the grand through deploying key strategic technologies. Enabling the Process The company has a fairly standard process for steady state innovation using a version of a stage gate model to funnel development ideas through a well-resourced system designed to generate customized solutions to particular 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 clearly defined.They have particularly 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 accomplishment with others quite an than trying to own all the resources, there has been a growing trend to network- and alliance-based product development.Their existing accomplishment 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. associate to this has been their extended 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 quickly by being able to focus resources. 2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 2 Case Studies Building an Innovative Organization accenting knowledge flows across the organization and creating structures to enable creative interchanges amongst them. Strong core value of quality and continuous improvement.Deliberate attempt to create communities of design enable setting up of differentmix teams to bring some variety into the knowledge gene pool. Use of storytelling as a chemical mechanism to build and communicate shared computer storage and collective ingenuity. Development of flexible critical mass the ability to quickly concentrate key human resources on high priority projects. This is underpinned by the storytelling since this quickly and effectively communicates and shares good practice around how su ch 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 access 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 gather 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 approa ches to try and recapture 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 fashion of Innovation (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2001). 2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 3