Toyota Innovation Strategy |
The innovation strategy at Toyota means the continuous search for solutions that are creative, unique and elegant. This Japanese company conquered the car world especially during the time when GM and Ford are rightsizing and downsizing. Since the Toyota team was able to continue getting things right, they have become one of the most acknowledge leader in global industry of automotive. For this company, small and incremental innovations over time can snowball into very huge improvement when it comes to efficiency, productivity and output. One of Toyota’s has the most influential centers when it comes to innovation design strategy. These centers are involved on almost all major design program of Toyota with its vision of constantly moving forward where design playa a major role. For this company, design is considered as the face of their innovation strategy. They follow certain rules which have now become the company mantra. You can download excellent powerpoint slides on Marketing Strategy and Marketing Management HERE. Foremost, innovation strategy means balancing today and tomorrow. People cannot tell what they want to have in the future, but they know exactly what they want to have now. In coming with a new vehicle designs, they intend to strike balance between creativity and market acceptability. They make sure to push the envelopes as they become progressive, but not going too far to the point that customers will not understand. The design that they come up with evokes some familiarity or some emotions while at the same time offers something unfamiliar and new. They endeavor to avoid strict bias on their design by keeping in mind who they are designing for. They keep their focus outward towards the problems that they try to solve for their wide base clientele. Innovation strategy at Toyota also means keeping the design resonant and real. This company understands that there is some sense of imperativeness to make each design count in order to resonate to the buyers. The company cannot stand still as the customer keeps changing and moving. The believe that if one will not have a good understanding of the emotional and functional needs of the consumers, the design created will simply fleetingly fall flat. Innovation strategy at Toyota also means blending competition with creativity as creative contribution is taken seriously. This has been made an essential part of their performance review as well as evaluation perspective. They work as a team that is overlaid on intense competition to get the most winning ideas. For every kind of design, they have smaller teams on the hunt. This makes up for the flow of creativity as it gives their people more freedom of thinking. You can download excellent powerpoint slides on Marketing Strategy and Marketing Management HERE. They dispensed with the layering which some other organizations employ as they believed that this hierarchy is likely to stifle innovation. This company believes in the importance of honest and open disagreement about specific ideas and each given idea really counts. The studios of Toyota compete with each other in order to win the business. With this, complacency has been minimized as they treat centers for internal design as an arm length vendor partners. One of the most innovative ideas that Toyota introduced in the market is when they redesign of their cars in order to achieve the goal of fuel economy. The cars introduced come with an extensive aerodynamic feature. The front, back, sides and bottom are designed in such a way as to minimize the drag induced air turbulence. The changes made are more than just for cosmetics purposes. Instead of rough underside, they made use of panels with smooth aerodynamics and winglets which reduced drag passing between the car and the road. The wheel shape and liner also help in effectively reducing the drag. In order to lessen fuel guzzling weight, innovation strategy at Toyota also made the car battery as an integral structural part of it and not just bolt on box. Their design team carefully scrutinized and further improved driver and car interfaced. The newer models of cars have real time feedbacks about power system activities and fuel consumptions. This is a feature that most hyper-milers really love. They introduced the model which can be driven to run on the battery alone for about 10 minutes, on power mode in order to accelerate snappily and in eco mode which is fuel sipping energy conservation. They even have models with fan that is solar powered and is placed on the roof in order to cool the temperature in the cabin. This means that the driver need not set the air conditioning on blast when they first enter the car. Innovation strategy at Toyota can be best explained by two Japanese words: kaizen and genchi. The former means continuous improvement and the latter means what customer wants on a car. Their design and engineering teams are committed in making more innovative, comfortable, efficient and luxurious cars that every clientele will desire. You can download excellent powerpoint slides on Marketing Strategy and Marketing Management HERE.
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