An academic innovator: Henry Chesbrough

Autor de Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Jossey-Bass, 2011)

La entrada es de Strategy+Business aquí, by Rob Norton


Extracto de inicio de la entrevista de S+B a H.Ch.:

"Economists debate whether a service-based economy can be truly robust — or whether prosperity depends on having enough of a manufacturing base to support service businesses. But what if this turned out to be a false dichotomy? That’s the question raised by innovation expert Henry Chesbrough. All successful manufacturers, in Chesbrough’s view, need to come to terms with a fundamental change: the accelerating flows of knowledge and information that are shortening product cycles and commoditizing their products. They can do this, he says, only by reinventing themselves, not as pure manufacturers or service providers, but as hybrid product–service companies that design their business models around creating more meaningful experiences for their customers."

Extracto de la primera pregunta y respuesta en la entrevista:

"S+B: How did your idea of open services innovation evolve?
CHESBROUGH: It began with thinking about the idea of the commodity trap. Richard D’Aveni at Dartmouth wrote an excellent book about the phenomenon [Beating the Commodity Trap: How to Maximize Your Competitive Position and Increase Your Pricing Power, Harvard Business Press, 2010]. He captures something important: the difficulty — given the globalization of manufacturing and, increasingly, the globalization of innovation itself — of sustaining a competitive advantage. If you are focused on making a better product that you drop in a box and ship, and it’s up to the customer to figure it out from there, I think you have a very, very hard time staying ahead of your competitors for very long in today’s environment. That was the motivation.

I trace the evolution of the cell phone in some detail in the book as one illustration. Commoditization is why Motorola had difficulties earlier on and Nokia is having them today. Today you have handsets coming from companies like HTC in Taiwan, and Samsung and LG in Korea, and many others, and you can imagine there will be handsets coming out of China and other places. Everybody understands how to do total quality management, enterprise resource planning, and all the methodologies of Six Sigma, so the things that let companies differentiate themselves and make better products have now become very widely distributed. It makes it harder and harder to sustain a good margin if you’re not simultaneously providing opportunities to wrap experiences around the products that you’re making. And these don’t have to be your own services, either; they can be others’."