The road from idea to marketing a new product or service can be bumpy. Many promising ideas fail to make it to the market – despite considerable investments of time and resources.
Concepts like Just in Time, Total Quality Management and Kanban show how successful procedures and methods for innovation can be transferred between companies in very different parts of the world.
The idea behind the AsiaNBC project is to study innovation processes in leading companies in Denmark, Singapore, China and Korea in order to identify methods, which could be transferred and adopted between cultures and across specific local contexts to improve the efficiency of the innovation process.
Indeed, we have identified a number of important differences in approach to innovation that may challenge and inspire any company working on new business creation.
- The ability of Asian companies to create products that match their customers’ needs and budgets closely, and to do so rapidly is a skill that Western companies should both fear and learn from.
- Likewise, the Western emphasis on creating fundamentally new products and their focus on the customer’s entire experience with a solution is something, which industrial Asian manufacturers may soon be struggling to learn.
The AsiaNBC is not drawing conclusions as to what is the ”right” or ”wrong” approach. What is best is highly dependent on the circumstances a particular company finds itself in. Rather, we are presenting a number of ideas, methods and ways of organizing that may challenge and inspire. We are hoping that a company, seeing the approaches that others are using successfully, will consider what it might imply, should they try a similar approach.
How would planning, budgets, risks, speed, customer relations and the skills needed, change if a Western company tried to act more like an Asian?