Product and Evolutionary & Revolutionary Innovations - Essay Example

They defined market orientation as the mix of customer orientation & competitor orientation. However Slater and Narver (1998. pp1000-1005) argued that customer orientation and market orientation should not be mixed. Customer orientation often results in short term myopic innovations whereby it is assumed that customers know very well what they want and hence following their wish list will automatically result in improved competitive advantages of the organizations. They further argued that customers grossly lack foresight of what they need and hence the organization will end up getting defocused from what they need and hence their products sell till the time the customers change their choices by realizing that this was not they needed.

Market orientation appears similar to customer orientation but there is a fundamental difference - market orientation is focused on customer needs and not their desires. Market orientation needs serious inter-functional orientation because the market study needs to be translated into long term goals and corresponding product innovations. An organization can get the best out of market orientation when they have sufficient skills to develop products that are not easy for competitors to imitate thus achieving an overall enhancements in competitive advantages.

Olson & Walker et al. (1995. pp. . on for new product innovations with help of market orientation - Bureaucratic Control, Individual Liaisons, Temporary Task Forces, Integrating Managers, Matrix Structures, Design Teams and Design Centers. On the other hand, innovations for customer orientation may not require such in-depth inter-functional coordination. Hence, the author concludes that both market orientation and inter-functional orientation of an organization are important and their effective integration results in newness of the products.

"Evolutionary" and "Revolutionary" innovationsVeryzer (1998. pp. 304-321) defined two fundamental types of innovations - evolutionary or continuous innovations and revolutionary or discontinuous innovations. The evolutionary innovations are targeted to evolve incremental innovations of the existing products thus allowing them to continue with improved features. The revolutionary innovations are radical in nature that takes the world by surprise through some kind of breakthrough that forces the corresponding existing products to obsolescence.

The author observed that the definitions of the two types of innovations explained by the researchers are from the perspective of the innovators that are carrying out technological changes in the existing products. But these two aspects should also be seen from the perspective of end users as well. From an end user perspective, something is radical only when it completely changes the way they have been seeing the product. The author hereby presents an example of VCR versus CD/DVD players. From the perspective of the innovators, both are completely different technologies and hence CD/DVD players are revolutionary innovations.

But the end users may argue that their primary objective was to see video on their television sets