Innovation and Commercialisation Strategies for Aston Martin

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Innovation and Commercialisation
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Table of Contents
Introduction...................................................................................................................... 3
LO1.................................................................................................................................. 4
LO2.................................................................................................................................. 7
LO3................................................................................................................................ 11
LO4................................................................................................................................ 16
Conclusion..................................................................................................................... 17
Reference list................................................................................................................. 18
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Introduction
Innovation is implementation of invented product by the organisation in order to serve
values to their customers. Commercialisation is introduction of new products as well as
services into the market. The importance of innovation and invention will be discussed.
The assignment will cover aspects about Aston Martin Company. L. Martin and R.
Bamford founded it in 1947(astonmartin.com). Aston Martin is recognised as a PLC
company, which has industry of luxury goods along with automobiles manufacturing
(Gross et al., 2018). Its total revenue is 1100 million and it operates worldwide with over
4000 employees serving for them. This assignment will provide the analysis of different
factors that can shape innovation along with commercialisation. The different aspects
associated with frugal innovation along with appropriate example shall be discussed.
The different process of commercialisation and innovation along with business shall
been explained. The analyses of different ways of funding along with various tools that
can help in protecting the intellectual work of organisation are discussed.
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LO1
P1 Explain innovation and determine its importance to organisations in
comparison with invention.
An invention is defined as creating a product as well as services. It is an idea of
developing new products. Innovation is implementation of new products as well as
modification of existing products.
Basis Invention Innovation
Definition Invention is defined as a developing
new idea or plan for making a product
or services, which will be introduced for
first time (Barraquand et al., 2015).
Innovation is defined as the
process of implementing
invention for first time.
Purpose The invention is carried out in the
search of new products. Invention of
new product is done when there is entry
of new product by the competition.
The innovation is carried out
for providing values to new
and existing product. The
need of a product and
improvement of existing
products are the main purpose
of innovation. (Resnick et al.,
2016).
Concept Invention is a new original idea as well
as new working. Inventions are always
based on something new and fresh.
.
Innovation is implementation
of that original and new idea.
The concept is based on both
implementing a new product
and modifying existing
products.
Skills Invention of new product requires the
scientific skills. No other skills of
employees help in carrying out
invention.
Innovation of a new product
requires marketing, scientific
as well as strategic skills.
Along with scientific skills,
many other skills are required
for implementing Innovation in
an organisation.
Occurrences Invention occurs when scientist comes
out with new ideas. Only the inventors
and scientists carry out the invention.
Innovation occurs as per the
requirement of improving a
product or implementing a
new product. Its occurrences
is based on both new products
and existing products.
Concerns The main concern of invention is Innovation concern is
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designing a new product as well as
services.. Invention mainly concentrates
on a single product or services at a time
(Gupta et al., 2018).
combining different product as
well as services. Thus, it is not
associated with a single
products or services.
Activities R & D department are generally
associated with the activities of
Invention.
The activities of Innovation
products are done by whole
organisation. In order to
implement a new product or
existing products, it is
important that all department
activities are functioning as
innovation is concerned with
many various products as well
as services.
Table 1: Comparison Chart of Innovation and Invention
(Source: created by the learner)
The similarity between Innovation and invention can be explained with the help of their
application in the organisation. Both Innovation as well as Invention is carried out in
search of improvement in efficiency of the business. Invention is carries out for
designing a new plan or business whereas Invention is carried out for implementing new
product and services. The aim and purpose of both Invention and Innovation is creating
a value for the products along with differentiating the products from other competitive
industries (Lyu et al., 2019). Both Innovation and Invention are unable to function
without the help of each other.
P2 Explain how organisational vision, leadership, culture and teamwork can
shape innovation and commercialisation.
The organisation vision, culture, teamwork and leadership play very crucial roles in
shaping the fortune of innovation and commercialisation. All these factors are briefly
explained below.
Vision- The goals of innovation become active when the manager establishes a clear
vision within the organisation. Aston martin can use vision in several ways for shaping
its innovation and commercialisation.
 Defining Challenges and opportunities - A clear vision of an organisation
helps in defining the challenges of the company. Aston Martin can use their
vision for defining the challenges for innovation after analysing different threats
and opportunities that can affect the innovation in an organisation. Aston Martin
should seek for various challenges and should find alternative opportunities for
innovation in their organisation (Bali et al., 2016).
 Defining direction- Vision of Aston Martin can help the organisation in selecting
the appropriate opportunities for innovation among the various alternatives. This
can help the organisation in embracing risk as well as failure for innovation,
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increasing collaboration, creating innovation and commercialisation for
organisation in future.
 Defining the Inner vision - The creation of inner vision will help the organisation
in capturing the innovation of products and services in an organisation. Aston
Martin should define their inner vision by analysing at their own vision, which will
help the organisation in accomplishing innovation and commercialisation in the
company.
Leadership- Leaders provides shape to commercialisation as well as innovation. Here
are some of the benefits of leadership in context to innovation and commercialisation.
 Collaboration- Leadership helps in achieving collaboration in the organisation.
Collaboration is the driving tools for innovation. Aston Martin leaders should try to
provide collaboration in the organisation, as it will help in creating idea for
innovation and commercialisation.
 Communication- Leadership quality helps in creating strong communication,
which helps the team in identifying rhythm and innovative ideas. The manager of
Aston Martin should communicate and provide variety of different direction to
their employees to create innovation (Johannessen, 2017).
 Correction and perfection- Leadership helps in creating a perfect team. They
are associated with correcting the wrongs and making it perfect. The manager of
Aston Martin should provide correction and then perfection to the different team
in an organisation. This will enable them in capturing innovation in different areas
of organisation.
Culture- Culture is associated with behaviour of employees and managers in an
organisation and thus, plays some role in shaping innovation.
 Communication- A proper culture in an organisation leads to a proper
communication among the employees and leaders, which helps the
organisation in implementing innovation. Aston Martin should try to develop a
culture that leads in improvement of communication.
 Involvement of employees- A proper culture in an organisation leads to
collaboration. Collaboration helps the organisation in involvement of
maximum employees. Therefore, It is important for Aston Martin to create a
culture in which the involvement of each employees for innovation and
commercialisation (Dezi et al., 2018).
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LO2
P3 Explain the 4Ps of innovation and explain the use of the innovation funnel to
examine and shape innovative ideas.
Figure 1: Four Ps of Innovation
(Source: (Mazzarol et al., 2018)
4Ps of innovation helps in exploring the feasible improvement that can be achieve in
every areas of Aston Martin. 4Ps of innovation includes four steps, which represents
each other. These four steps for innovation of the products of Aston Martin are
explained below.
Paradigm- It is the process of framing the work. Aston Marti should improve their way
of operating business. Aston Martin should look their company in a different paradigm.
They need to think on the same thing with different perspective such as leading with
vision, advance holistic designing of their cars, advancing the technology, providing
flexibility in the products, introducing more race and speed cars.
Products- It is a process of offering the different products to their customer. Aston
Martin needs to query their team about how can they improve the quality of their
product. Aston Martin should get committed in innovation of their products and
advancing their technology. They should focus on creating powerful electric motors,
automatic system and advanced technology (Dincer, 2017).
Process- The process method in Innovation is not based on preparation of products as
well as services. Instead, it focuses on enhancing the supply, flow of work, selection of
employees and training. Along with these processes, the latest trend for carrying out
these methods should also be analysed. Aston martin should try to build relationship
with other organisation like Tesla, Toyota, and Panasonic. Cooperation from these
companies along with the teams of Research and Development can help in a successful
innovation on both Aston Martin products and technology.
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Position- Position helps in making changes based on application of innovation on the
Aston Martin products. These changes are done by looking on the factors such as
communication, customers, members, public, image, brand, profit and more. Aston
Martin should try to create new markets for luxurious and comfortable electric
automobiles to become one of the leading automobile industries globally. This market
should be different as compared to old petrol automobiles, expensive luxury cars or gas
powered cars.
Figure 2: Innovation funnel
(Source: (Gross et al., 2018))
An Innovation funnel is defined as steps that help in development of a process as well
as product. The main purpose is to establish a process in order to meet the requirement
of maximum customers. Here are the four stage described below for shaping innovation
and commercialisation in Aston Martin Company.
First stage (Idea collection) - On first stage, Aston Martin should increase the
information base along with its knowledge. This stage focuses on collection on all data
and information.. Aston Martin should develop a prior strategy for the importance of
information. The information that Aston Martin needs to collect includes competition,
partners, research, institutes and more. It can also be collected from the analysis of
market. Aston Martin needs to clear its objective for this stage to perform faster. Aston
Martin should start exploring the ideas and should try to relate them with their
company’s objectives.
Second Stage (Investigation) - The investigation of first stage is called second stage.
This process includes matching the different ideas with the goals of Aston Martin to find
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their relation. Aston Martin should apply this stage in order to identify the appropriate
idea that will match the goals and objectives of the company. This should be done to
make sure that idea that will be selected must relate with company’s objectives.
Third Stage (Process Design) - After the completion of second stage, Aston Martin
needs to carry out an analysis of threats and opportunity for the selection of an idea.
Aston Martin needs to study the customer needs and desire from the products they
offer. Once the Idea is selected then allocation of resource should be done. After the
resources are allocated the implementation of process design is achieves.
Fourth stage (scale-up) - At last stage Aston Martin needs to make sure that the idea
or plan that was selected for implementation is delivered as per the purpose of Aston
Martin. This implementation is compared with the expectation. Thus, Aston Martin is
capable of launching their fresh product to create values in the market.
P4 Explain developments in frugal innovation and provide examples of how it is
used in an organisational context.
Frugal innovation
Figure 3: Frugal innovation
(Source: Weyrauch and Herstatt, 2017)
Every car company is looking to add modern features in its models and make it
competitive like racing cars; Aston Martin can choose to use frugal innovation. There is
a section of people at UK, who do not have strong financial backgrounds and they
desire to own a cheap car with good features (gov.uk, 2018). This is creating an
opportunity for car companies to make an automobile, which is cheap yet good. Aston
Martin will have to target the bottom section of market to generate profit. The bottom
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section here refers to people of low-income group. The company should consider three
sections, which are main important factors in frugal innovation before applying this
technique. These are product, market and business and by considering it, Aston Martin
will be able to develop a product, which will be beneficial for them (Radjou and Prabhu,
2015).
Product
The car models will only be successful if they are able to build cheapest model in the
industry. They can consider using modern engineering techniques to find out features,
which are necessary for customers and offerings of other companies to them. Aston
Martin can introduce some new features and cut off unnecessary ones to decrease
the production cost of a car model. This will give them more profit from it or more
amount of sales, due to the decrease in production cost. They can make the car more
light and cut costs of metal by using maximum amount of good quality fibre in their car
models. People are demanding lighter car models these days, as it saves a lot of fuel
and increases efficiency. It is mandatory to maintain the quality and saving cost does
not mean that the quality can be compromised. This innovation strategy helps to identify
requirement of customers and the features they do not want in their car and makes it
according to their demand. The car should have high reliability, yet the price should be
low (Bhatti et al., 2018). The company can use scrap materials and use it to make new
cars in future. This will lower their production cost, as they will not have to buy raw
materials.
Market
Aston Martin should concentrate on un-served market and base their innovation on it.
Therefore, their market survey team needs to take responsibility to find out what
people wants. This will reveal many unnecessary features, which are not required for
their car models and previously people who had financial constraints, were not able to
buy it due to high price. The company can only become successful in implementing it, if
they have proper feedback from the market. Identifying various sectors of the market is
important and this will support Aston Martin to place their product properly (Bhatti et al.,
2018).
Business
Aston Martin will need to improve their business methods to identify proper ways to
present their product to companies. They can participate in car festivals to display their
new car. There should be a mass appeal in their promotional techniques and it should
highlight their main strong point of the latest car model. It is their duty to convince
people, that Aston Martin is the only company, who has come up with a great car in low
price. They should project that the price of the car is low but the car is not cheap in
quality. The profit margin may be thin for Aston Martin for each car, but if they are able
to sell it at huge numbers, they will be able to yield huge financial benefits for the
company (Weyrauch and Herstatt, 2017). They can fix low prices for their cars, which
will attract lower income group and this will in return let Aston Martin sell more cars in
this section.
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LO3
P5 Explain the importance of the commercial funnel and the application of new
product development (NPD) processing for commercialisation of innovation. 550
Commercial funnel
Figure 4: Commercial funnel
(Source: McCord et al., 2018)
The “commercial funnel” provides a perfect way to sell products and it is ideal for
commercialising the innovation. Aston Martin can use it to sell their new car models
to newly obtained customers.
Awareness
Aston Martin should bring their new cars in to people’s attention by using modern
campaigning methods. They will have to make sure that people know about their new
product’s existence in market. Awareness will help the company to move their
customers to the next stage of the funnel (McCord et al., 2018).
Interest
Aston Martin will have to promote their new product to attract people. They have to
generate certain amount of interest by mentioning the features of the product and
highlighting it repeatedly to consumers. They can offer celebrities to endorse their
products and hold examples of common people to generate interest (Godewyn et al.,
2016).
Consideration
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The customers will now consider the features of their products with competitors. They
will consider many factors from price to accessibility. Aston Martin will have to offer
customers a proper price and various ways to make the purchase through financial
transfers.
Purchase
This is the final stage of the funnel and Aston Martin should be able to reach it only if
they are able to convert interested people in to customers for them. Customers will now
buy the product by re considering previous factors like price and features.
New product development
Figure 5: NPD
(Source: Homburg et al., 2015)
Ideation
An idea should be generated for making a new product and it should be based upon
demand of the market. Aston Martin should channelize new ideas and it can be found
from marketing department.
Design
The product is designed according to the report from market survey and it should
consist of feature people are wanting. The designing phase should include R&D team of
Aston Martin and design specialists to generate better designs through amalgamation
of ideas (Homburg et al., 2015).
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