Strategy and Innovation: How Fujitsu Drives Success
This paper examines the relationship between business strategy and innovation using Fujitsu Limited as a case study. Drawing on Miles and Snow's strategic typology, the paper identifies Fujitsu as a prospector-type firm whose strategic orientation has enabled continuous product and process innovation. It discusses how Fujitsu capitalised on its business strategy process, why the company embraced open innovation through partnerships with Silicon Valley firms, and what information should inform strategic decision-making. The paper also addresses how Fujitsu can strengthen its innovation strategy going forward, referencing lessons from companies such as Nokia, HP, and Yahoo, and arguing that coherent alignment of all organisational components around innovation is essential for sustaining competitive advantage.
- Introduction: Defines scope and introduces Fujitsu as case
- Fujitsu's Strategic Orientation and Miles and Snow's Model: Classifies Fujitsu as a prospector-type firm
- Capitalising on the Business Strategy Process: How strategy process drives resource allocation
- Embracing Open Innovation: Fujitsu's shift to collaborative innovation model
- Enhancing Strategic Innovation: Recommendations for sustaining innovation performance
- Conclusion: Organisational coherence as key to lasting innovation
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds its argument in a recognisable theoretical framework (Miles and Snow's typology) and applies it directly to a real-world company, making abstract concepts concrete and testable.
- Uses specific, illustrative examples — TechShop Inside, cloud computing partnerships, and the cautionary tales of Nokia, Yahoo, and HP — to support each analytical claim rather than relying solely on assertions.
- Maintains a clear through-line from strategic orientation to innovation outcomes, consistently returning to the central thesis that strategy drives innovation.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied case analysis: it selects an established theoretical lens (Miles and Snow's strategic typology and Pisano's innovation strategy framework), maps the theory onto a real firm's observable behaviour, and uses that mapping to generate normative recommendations. This technique bridges descriptive analysis and prescriptive argument, a common and valued approach in business and management writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad claim about innovation and competitive advantage, then narrows to Fujitsu's profile and strategic classification. The middle sections trace how the firm's strategy process led to open innovation adoption and outline concrete areas for improvement. The conclusion synthesises the argument by stressing organisational coherence as the key to sustained innovation. This funnel structure — from theory to case to recommendation — is well-suited to business strategy essays at the undergraduate level.
Introduction
Innovation, both product- and process-wise, has increasingly become a crucial source of competitive advantage in today's business world. Organisations that continually reinvent their products and processes in accordance with environmental dynamics achieve greater success in the marketplace compared to those that pay little or no attention to innovation (Beyene & Wu, 2016). Successful innovation, however, is predominantly dependent on an organisation's business strategy (Hajar, 2015). A firm's strategic orientation determines the extent to which it introduces new products or new ways of doing things. In other words, without the right strategy, an organisation may not innovate successfully.
The connection between strategy and innovation is particularly evident in the case of Fujitsu Limited, a Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company. With reference to Fujitsu, this paper discusses the impact of strategy on innovation. Attention is paid to how the company has capitalised on the value of the business strategy process, how the firm can improve strategic innovation, what information should be leveraged within a business strategy, and how business strategy may be used to further innovation within the organisation.
Fujitsu was founded in 1935 as a subsidiary of Fuji Electric. Initially, the firm manufactured telephones and automatic exchange equipment, but later expanded into computers and ICT services with a mission to exploit ICT to generate value for both businesses and society. The growth was mainly fuelled by extension of its core businesses as well as acquisitions. By 2000, Fujitsu was the top ICT firm in Japan, delivering a wide array of ICT products and services, including big data, cloud, and security solutions. With about 95,000 pending and approved patents worldwide and 162,000 employees in 420 subsidiaries spread across more than 100 countries, the firm's revenues were $46 billion as of 2014 (Edmondson & Harvey, 2016). This makes Fujitsu one of the largest ICT companies in the world. Presently, the firm is focusing on increasing its competitive advantage in the North American market, which is dominated by IBM, Accenture, and Hewlett Packard (HP).
References
Beyene, K., & Wu, C. (2016). The impact of innovation strategy on organisational learning and innovation performance: Do firm size and ownership type make a difference? South African Journal of Industrial Engineering, 27(1), 125–136.
Edmondson, A., & Harvey, J. (2016, January 14). Open innovation at Fujitsu (A). Harvard Business Review, 1–20.
Hajar, I. (2015). The effect of business strategy on innovation and firm performance in the small industrial sector. The International Journal of Engineering and Science, 4(2), 1–9.
Hill, C., & Jones, G. (2012). Essentials of strategic management (3rd ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.
Pisano, G. (2015). You need an innovation strategy. Harvard Business Review, June Issue. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/06/you-need-an-innovation-strategy
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