User blog:Actzikas/Blog 1 - Ch3 - Types and Patterns of Innovation

             Today, innovation is the driving force of America’s economy. I believe while many are fixated on China’s growing economy, I believe that it will gradually slow down as they switch from becoming a economy focused on manufacturing to an economy focused on innovation. What I see today in China is what I saw in America since the 50’s, an era of manufacturing. Clearly we can see that this era is no longer our driving force in our economy with incidents such as what happened in Detroit in 2009. Countries such as America or Japan I believe have entered in this new era of innovation where companies are seeking to make products capable of vast capabilities while focusing on simplicity. Perhaps my last sentence may sound contradicting but think of the iPhone. The iPhone is capable of such vast capabilities and tasks, yet simple enough to where a kindergartener can use it for various tasks.

                 Innovation came to Honda when it sought to change how the modern vehicle would receive its energy. Honda sought change, and with change they created a precedent in where cars were heading in the 21st century. With the implementation of environmentally friendly cars they became innovators in the car industry and forced other companies such as Ford, GM, and Hyundai to become early adopters in this rapidly growing area.

                 In regards to Chapter 3, I digress when the book says that Honda’s new hybrid electric vehicle was solely of product innovation. Yes, I agree that the development of new hybrid vehicles was indeed a product innovation but if it wasn’t for a change in the process innovation of making these vehicles marketable to the consumer ‘s eye than the demand and supply for the product would have surely died out.

                 When talking about incremental vs. radical innovation I believe one should consider technology under the basis of Moore’s Law which is “the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.” In a more general sense, I am making the relation to this law in that what today technology may seem radical at the time (such as the example of the steam engine) will surely become only an incremental step to the next radical innovation (such as an airplane engine). Another example would be cameras. When they were first introduced it took decades for them to be replaced by colored photographs and then only a matter of years they got replaced by digital cameras and then only in a shorter time span our PHONES virtually replace all consumer cameras. There is this principle that the time to reach the next step in an area of technology reciprocates shorter and shorter.

                 When discussing and understanding the S-Curve one could correlate and relate this curve to the product life cycle curve. Where at the beginning of both curves one invest heavily in a new project and if results are positive they grow, mature, and finally decline to becoming a general product or type of accessible technology. I believe that these two curves undergo pretty much the same principle.