Innovation typically focuses on the conventional logic of either exploiting new market opportunities (through a demand pull approach) or discovering new previously unknown markets (through a technology push or a Blue Ocean approach).
As the environment becomes more complex it makes both exploitation and discovery harder and less effective. How then can firms innovate in these settings?
Through interviews with managers from 13 companies operating in China, CEIBS Associate Professor of Strategy Peter Moran and Michele Simoni, Associate Professor of Marketing & Innovation at Parthenope University of Naples in Italy, explored the challenges of pursuing innovation in the rapidly changing Chinese market. These interviews helped them to identify a new logic and several of its key features that they call Market Shaping Design Innovation (MSDI). MSDI comprises a transformational process that seeks to change and simultaneously orchestrate the conditions required to create value. These conditions are the perception of a service that an existing set of resources can deliver; the existence and availability of a technology that can enable and deliver such a service; and the meaningfulness of the service to a user. MSDI shapes the market by changing the service, technology and meaning and thereby transforming the existing market into a new one that would not otherwise have come about. It has five distinguishing features: Purpose, Persistence, Design, Market Prototyping and an Emergent Process that the researchers describe as ‘guided effectuation’.
Phase I workshop (Shanghai)
The professors discussed the Phase I findings of their research at the 14th CEIBS China Innovation Forum, held in Shanghai on January 12, 2016. The companies that participated in Phase I are GE Healthcare, Philips, Merck, Evonik, Faurecia, Reckitt Benckiser, BGI, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Huawei, Cloud Charity, Onion Math, and Mi Charity.
Managers from Phase I participating companies located in Shanghai, as well as nine new companies, joined the forum and shared their practices and thoughts on this approach. A second workshop is being planned (for Beijing) in the coming two to three months.
Phase II of the research is about to start!!
In Phase II, researchers will take a deep dive into studying three to five companies in order to follow some specific selected innovation projects over time. Interviews with internal (at various organizational levels) and external parties involved in these projects will be conducted.
If you are interested in attending the next workshop or think your organization might be interested and willing to participate in the Phase II study, simply click on the link to register your information and we will follow-up with you.
If you have any questions, please contact us via wwing@ceibs.edu or call +86-(0)21-2890-5136.