Innovation strategies and organizational performance at Apple, Disney, and Google

Innovation

Assessing the Impact of Innovation on Organizations

The impact of innovation on the business processes, models, frameworks, go-to-market and product development strategies of Apple, Disney and Google are changing the foundations of the markets they compete in daily. Apple's exceptional innovation at first MP3 players and now tablet PCs and PDAs changed the music industry, where record labels are reporting in some months more revenues from iTunes than from their own distribution channels (Ritson, 2004). Google's preeminence in advertising model thought leadership and innovation practices today find 57% of their revenues from ideas generated through the Rule of 20% (Gawer, Cusumano, 2008). The essence of this rule is that each engineer in Google gets one day a week to pursue their own invention, and this has generated as of 2010, 57% of total company revenues. The Walt Disney Company has not only created breakthroughs in animation and motion pictures but also in digital forms of entertainment and is a world leader in integrated marketing communications innovations (BusinessWeek, 2007). Each of these company's abilities to innovate is exceptional, and the intent of this paper is to evaluate the impact of their innovations on their strategy, processes, products and service development over time.

Google and Continuous Innovation

The culture of Google, like Apple, celebrates innovation and risk-taking, and also has a highly unique approach to managing its engineer's time to support greater levels of innovation being attained. When the company was first founded the Rule of 20% was introduced to provide one day a week for engineers to work on projects and applications of interest (Gawer, Cusumano, 2008). Today the rule of 20% is responsible for just over half of all revenues (57%) generated by Google. The development of Google G-Mail is one of the best-known as is the creation of Picasa and Google Scholar as well. Google's senior management team realizes that to the extent they can continually deliver new applications is the extent to which they will become a platform, not being relegated to only a search engine (Gawer, Cusumano, 2008). The development of Chrome, a Web-based operating system that can work within a browser, to the development of Google Office, and Translate, an incredibly powerful tool for translating documents of all types from one language to another all came into existence due to the Rule of 20%.

All of these innovations have over time completely re-ordered the definition of strategy within the company as well, concentrating the focus more on services and extension to enterprises on the one hand, and being the replacement of individual operating systems on the other. Google's single largest revenue producing service is Google AdWords, which generates approximately 30% of revenue any given quarter (Economist, 2007). Advertising-based revenue models are continually being evaluated as strategic alternatives by Google today, as are the processes supporting them. The processes in fact for the development of the next generation of advertising models based on contextual search and integration to social networking platforms will continue to fuel Google's ascension into a global computing platform (Gawer, Cusumano, 2008). The outgrowth of these innovations taken together will eventually lead to services being tailored to the specific needs of businesses by their relative size, segment and need, in addition to the needs of consumers as well. Google's rapid growth is attributable to unleashing innovation and sustaining it over time.

The Walt Disney Company

From its initial success in entertainment to the development of a media conglomerate through mergers and acquisitions, the Walt Disney Company is consistently considered one of the most innovative companies in the world (BusinessWeek, 2007). Walt Disney's inventing animation techniques revolutionized films in the 20th century and the core areas of the company have since moved to advanced digitally-based technologies to achieve even more realistic representations. All of these innovations have served to create one of the most valuable and varied series of creative assets in any company globally, from films and characters to digital properties and entire networks (Business Week, 2007). One of the most significant innovations of Disney however transcends the creativity and innovation in entertainment production. Their best practices in integrated marketing communications (IMC) and the development of marketing strategies is considered to also be one of the world's best use of marketing strategies to cross-promote different segments of the same business (BusinessWeek, 2007). Over and above the innovation and many contributions to the areas of animation and film-making Disney has been singularly responsible for the innovation of how to make IMC strategies resonate and reflect the needs of customers over time. They are in essence redefining integrated marketing and channel promotions in the processes they are designing. This innovation, process-centric, is even more difficult to emulate as a competitor as it integrates from the innate strengths of each area of the organization.