Innovation - Google, Apple, Gm, Toyota

Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction 2

1.1 Introduction to Innovation .......................................................................2

1.1 Introduction to Innovation .......................................................................2

2.0 Innovative companies 3

3.0 Google 4

4.0 Apple 5

5.0 Apple vs Google 6

6.0 Toyota 6

7.0 General Motors (G.M)......................................................................................7

8.0 Toyota vs G.M 7

9.0 Conclusion 8

10.0 Bibliography 9

1.0 Introduction

1.1 Introduction to Innovation

No dream is too large and no distance is too far because of the life cycle keeps on

changing rapidly in 21st century. Because of the rapid changes in our life cycle, it brought improved lifestyle and technological progress, in order to keep the momentum of improvements where we have to really appreciate innovation. What is Innovation all about? - It might be defined as exploiting new ideas which leads to the creation of a new products and services. It is not just the creation of the new idea that is important , but it is about how to bring them into the market, putting into practice and exploiting it. Innovation possibly involves technological transformation and restructuring the management of the organization.

1.2 Importance of Innovation

Today, because of an increasing competition and accelerated products and service development cycles, innovation is a strategic priority for any organization. According to the research conducted by Ernst & Young (Johnston, 2009), have found innovation to be the important value of any corporate either durable or non-durable companies. In fact results also show that over 80% of company leadership surveyed say that innovation is critical for staying competitive and increase profitability. In addition to that, results also show that more than a half of the profit of most of the Giant organizations of the world comes from products launched in last 10 years.

So in todays competetive business, main concern of any company's management strategy is to encourage innovation with different channel of their company and especially from R&D. The best way of encouraging innovation is that companies have to establish policies that support different types of innovation, such as "Product innovation" - introducing a totally new prodcut or service or considerably improve the existing ones. "Process innovation" - implementation of a new or significantly enhanced production or delivery method. In addition to that, companies can be innovative in product design, packaging, its promotion and pricing which will be the result of "Marketing Innovation". As we can see there are so many types of Innovation within any organization which is essential for their business success.

2.0 Innovative companies

Usually it is quite hard to find a good example of innovative companies. Not because there is a shortage of innovative organizations to show as an example, but it depends on how do you define innovative company is. As I mentioned above, Innovation is all about coming out with new things and services and getting those products into the hands of the people who can benefit from them, and ultimately improving their lives. A lot of companies can have one successful product and majority revenue comes from it, but that is not an innovative company for me. For instance, according to Forbes magazine (Forbes, 2011) tech giant Microsoft was rated 86th Most innovative company of the world which couple years ago they were in top ten. I believe that it is true when they say "Innovation often gets slower as you get bigger" In past few years we don't see any new product from Microsoft. They might have fixed the shortcomings of Vista with Windows 7, growing Bing to more than 10 percent of the online search market share, and for synchronizing contacts, e-mail and social media tools into Outlook 2010, which I think they have immitated most of that features from Google. (Rivlin, 2011)

I think that, in order to be an innovative, a company has to repeatedly create new ideas and bring them into the market and become successfull with that. From my point of view the factor that defines an innovative company is culture, which differenciates them from not innovative ones. When the culture of innovation done right, it gives to the organization competitive advantage because it makes the organization more nimble with an increased abilities to respond to changes. According to Businessweek (Businessweek, 2011), Apple and Google was the most innovative companies in the world in 2010. What makes this two tech giants different from others? Let's get more into the detailed analysis of this two tech giants.

3.0 Google

When people think about Google, I bet they must often think that it is just a search engine company which provides high-quality responses. With $14 billion annual revenue, Google has evolved to become far more than an "Internet search and advertising company." (Salter, 2008) Google expanded its portfolio with new prodcuts and services since its modest start as a serch-engine project at Stanford University in the mid-90s. Today, Google is already a word processor, e-mail service, smartphone, and aims to be a storehouse of every printed word in human history. Google allows us to cruise the streets of New York and Rome, or scour the surfaces of the moon and Mars. We can track global flu trends, monitor our household energy usage or simply edit photos. (Kirby, 10/13/2009)

How is Googles innovation process like? The company closely integrates with the users in the design of its products and practices a type of collaborative product creation. Google understands the importance of including users at the early stage of products design. This gave rise to the logic of developing beta versions of the products which is available at Googlelabs.com. (Google, 2011) Testers can try them out and help to Google to improve before they launch the products or services. For