Innovation and Commercialisation at Heinz

Unit 8 Innovation and
Commercialisation

INTRODUCTION
Innovation is the strategic process through which a business organisation adds additional
value to its existing goods and services in an effort to better satisfy the demands, needs,
preferences and requirements of their customers. Commercialisation is the process through
which a business organisation introduces new goods and products into the consumer markets
(Gross and et.al., 2018). This report analyses the innovation and commercialisation operations of
Heinz, which is a food processing business organisation operating within the food processing
industries. Heinz was founded in 1869, 151 years ago and currently operates from its
headquarters in Pennsylvania, USA. On account of its sustained and long operations, Heinz has
expanded their business operations to global markets, with Heinz currently manufacturing
thousands of diverse food products through their manufacturing plants, which are located in 6
different continents of the world. This allows for Heinz to service various different global
markets, with Heinz currently serving customers in more than 200 different countries around the
world. In the USA, Heinz has been ranked as the first business organisation in Ketchup products,
on account of it capturing over 50% of the available market share.
MAIN BODY
LO 1
P1 Importance of Invention and Innovation at Heinz
Innovation is the strategic process through which a business organisation such as Heinz
can place emphasis on adding addition value to its manufactured and invented goods and
products which are already present within the external markets with the intention to better satisfy
the demands, requirements, needs and preferences of their customers within the food processing
industry. Addition of value to existing goods and products of Heinz can also allow for the
business organisation to be able to effectively meet the changing and diverse needs and demands
of the consumers within the food processing markets. Through innovation process, Heinz can
apply new and unique solutions to their existing market goods and products and increase their

overall value towards their consumers (Dincer, 2017). Heinz can also innovate their operational
processes in order to increase the operational performance, efficiency of the business
organisation and enhance its profitability and productivity within food processing industry. For
example Apple innovated upon past technologies and created the IPhone making use of
technologies and solutions already present in the external environments to provide their
customers with increased value.
On the other hand, invention is the strategic process of engineering and product
development, through which an individual or business organisation such as Heinz designs and
creates an absolutely new and unique good or product, the likes of which never existed in the
external environments or markets, prior to the invention process. Inventions process brings
together various different ideas, technologies, goods and services towards the desired result of
creating an absolutely new product or solution. As invention process results in creation of new
and unique products or solutions, they can be highly radical and breakthrough in nature, with the
invention having the potential to completely revamp and change the operations of an entire
industry. For example, the invention of light emitting diodes completely revolutionised how
electronic display panels are created and changed the entire electronics industry.
Both innovation and invention processes are highly important in a business organisation
such as Heinz. For its sustained successful operations within the food processing industry, as
through invention process, Heinz can create new products to satisfy the changing demands and
preferences of its customers and through innovation process, it can provide additional value to
customers from its existing goods and products. Both innovation and invention operations of
Heinz are influenced by various internal and external forces and factors such as the technological
solutions present in the external environment, which place a limit on the extent to which Heinz
can innovate and invent (Özilgen, 2019). Globalisation also significantly impacts the innovation
and invention operations of Heinz as the all of its innovation and invention operations have to
outcompete the inventions and innovations of global food processing business organisations for
Heinz to operate successfully.
The main key differences between innovation and invention process relates to the fact
that the result of invention operations outputs goods and solutions which were not available in
the external markets or environments prior to the invention, while innovation process takes as