This research explores the evolution of a high technology company from 'imitator' to 'innovator'. It identifies some key characteristics of 'imitators' and 'innovators' and describes the development of different capabilities and their priority through the evolution. The nature of these capabilities is discussed together with assessment of their interdependence and impact.

A case study approach is adopted with analysis of three distinct businesses within a single corporation. This placed some limits of the generealisability of the findings but a common business and cultural context allowed the internal transfer of capabilities to be addressed. Some clear patterns emerged:

• The evolution from imitation to innovation can usefully be categorised into four stages - external learning, internal learning and generation, dependent external performance, and independent external performance
• Production capability is shown to be closely coupled to innovative capability along several dimensions including:
  1. Organisation - through an overlapping group structure
  2. New product development - through a process for integrating R&D and manufacturing
  3. Product and process 'technology cascading' - to enable rapid exploitation of emerging product-based and process-based technologies across applications
  4. Manufacturing - through internal virtual manufacturing in diversified business divisions
• In the transformation process, different types of technology management tasks and priorities could be mapped using a five-step technology management process - identification, selection, acquisition, and exploitation to protection
• The parallel and coordinated development of production as well as product technologies are shown to have a major impact on product performance, rate of innovation and business competitiveness. The research throws new light on the role or production capability, and has implications for the development of high technology business. It also contributes towards innovation theory from the perspective of new entrants.

Woojae Kim

Further information

Yongjiang Shi E: ys@eng.cam.ac.uk