Corning Case Study Analysis

Elevator Pitch: What makes Corning different than other companies is their ability to balance, keeping their present technologies intact, while also focusing on new innovations. Centralized innovation is a phenomenon that needs a lot of precision, planning and accuracy to implement. When we talk about a company that is driven by innovation and takes pride in diversification, a reliable method to spread their wings is needed. This can be achieved by road mapping. Product differentiation and market trends play a pivotal role in this. Corning main competencies were innovation and corporate culture. Its strong focus on innovation gave the company a strong market position not only in their field of expertise, but also in the research of upcoming opportunities. When roadmap is implemented by market pull instead of technology push, it breeds successful innovation, which is exactly what Corning learned over time by a context of weak appropriation as an asset. The enormous success of Gorilla Glass in just the short time of three months is just one living example of this technique. The close relationship between R&D and marketing allowed the company to discover new market segments and to fulfill their needs under strong appropriation conditions. The strategic growth initiative served as the main tool to assure the integration of the technology and business strategy; it helped align their strategy and corporate culture.

1. What is R&D Road mapping? Give Examples.

R&D Road mapping according to Garcia and Bray is a planning process that helps identifying, selecting, and developing technology alternatives to fulfill a set of needs for a product driven by a set of requirements. It provides a way to develop, organize and present information about the critical system requirements and performance targets that must be satisfied by certain time frames and to make the best investment decisions and to leverage those investments. There are some types of technology road maps:

(a) product technology, which is by product/process needs

(b) the emerging technology roadmap, which is the focus of this case

(c) issue-oriented roadmap, which is focused on identifying issues and their consequences for project planning and budget. Two examples are SIA and NEMI Technology Roadmap.

2. What is the most relevant dimension of context of this case? Justify your answer.

We believe that the most important dimension of context of this case is corporate culture, despite the content related to technology management and innovation planning. Their culture is a unique differentiator that plays a part in their competitive advantage, and is one of the more difficult capabilities to emulate in a competitor. The proposed model of emerging technology roadmaps can work effectively in the company, but only if Corning Incorporated can support the processes with effective governance, human capital, and change management. Governance doesn’t just mean a hierarchy with policies, it means a method of coordinating and facilitating processes/activities. Human capital is the center of innovation; innovation is contingent on things like intellectual property development, tacit knowledge (LotusNotes is nothing without Ray Ozzi), engagement, and retention. Change management is paramount in any organization transition, especially when it calls for added structure.

3. What is (are) the core competence(s) of Corning?

Corning has a well-established culture of innovation that allows to continuously create new markets and business opportunities, this is integrated into the entire organization so efforts are combined. The main core competencies are innovation and corporate culture. Moreover, this allowed the company to innovate under strong appropriation condition, as they were focused on creating the keystone component to protect the value of the innovation. Finally, this culture also represented a strong link between the components of the innovation triangle (marketing, R&D, and operations), which assured strong appropriation conditions. The products were targeted to the right markets and the company had the capabilities to actually produce them.

4. How does this initiative help Corning implement R&D Road Mapping?

This initiative is basically what helped Corning to close the gap between R&D and marketing and to combine the market push and technology pull strategy. The early collaborations between these two functions allowed designing strong appropriation innovation strategies that will target real market needs.

Technology roadmap focuses on the future specific needs of customers to anticipate market trends. Corning innovation strategy basically consists of a rigorous exploration and evaluation of innovative ideas to assure that new business ideas would address those future market needs. We can assume technology road mapping as the input of Corning’s innovation process, as this process basically translates the road mapping projections into a strategy and technology plan to satisfy the market needs. In Corning’s 2008 annual report, long range planning was reported to be successful based on the initiative. In photovoltaics for instance, it helped explore how the firm leveraged flat glass for solar energy applications.

5. What surprised you about this case? Why?

One of the surprising aspects of the case is that even though the combination of road mapping and the overall innovation strategy was a competitive advantage in terms of predicting market needs and fulfilling user requirements, this strict systematic approach to innovation has some consequences. Refining structure often limits the autonomy of the project team; not only does that reduce their

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