Week 11 Reading Reflection

1)                  What was the biggest surprise for you in the reading? In other words, what did you read that stood out the most as different from your expectations?

Something that was different from my expectations was how close business strategy and innovation can actually work together. The article gave a great example with the Corning story and how over many years its innovation process has allowed the company for great success. Of course Corning’s process is not for everyone, so it may not be so successful if another company tried to do the same thing, which I find interesting because then how do company’s find an appropriate model to follow for their business?

2)                  Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you.

The grey area of the reading for me was the section called “managing the trade-offs”. Different styles of innovation practices like demand-push, supply-push, and crowd-sourcing were all mentioned as having varying degrees of success for certain types of businesses. What I was trying to understand is that each of these practices has a good and a bad outcome about them, and really in the end it us up to the innovator which to use for what and when.

3)                  If you were able to ask two questions to the author, what would you ask? Why?

Question one: What are some examples of different kinds of phase-gate processes that would be useful for markets dealing with technology? I am just rather curious since the term “phase-gate was used but no examples given.

Question two: What are some ways to create value and innovation for a company so that customers still remain interested? I ask this because isn’t the overall point of a business is to keep the customers happy so that the business makes a profit? So how could I go about doing that?

4)                  Any disagreements:

I mean not really going to disagree with anything. The article overall was extremely informative and interesting when it came to the topic of innovation. I enjoyed the fact that the article remained open and free for the reader to take away whatever they wanted about innovation, and how innovation itself is a constant experiment that we are learning from.