It’s worth comparing the innovation models of each to find out.
1. Samsung
Samsung originates in a highly deferential culture and has built its innovation model around five elements, the first of which allows them to redefine hierarchy way from traditional status:
- Developing a creative elite within the company based on innovation training
- Pursuing and circumventing patents of competitors
- Consistent, replicable company-wide innovation methodology
- Relying on external expertise for fundamental breakthrough science
- A conglomerate approach
2. Apple
Apple’s innovation
strategy had changed the way we all think about the post-industrial enterprise. Apple’s platform
strategy goes back as far as the first iTunes platform, which integrated external content with an Apple product (the Nano).
It evolved into the apps developer community and Apps Store, as Apple miraculously ramped up a developer community of hundreds of thousands in the space of two years.
At the same time, as reader Dave Nelson points out, Apple opted for extensive outsourcing and in so doing showed competitors the way – there was no need to build or invent, just go and buy Apple-like parts.
In the meantime Apple has been castigated for not repeating its disruptive success with the iPhone, when in fact a platform and ecosystem model is both a huge risk and a game changer that can yield cash for a long time. How ironic that Apple is under fire only five years after inventing it.
So what are the components of the Apple innovation model?
- The platform and the significant investment in seamless integration of developer and content provider contributions, user access and friction-free commerce. That platform strategy and execution still does not get the credit it deserves
- Design, as we all know. In smartphones the iPhone redefined the UI
- The competitive internal market as teams compete against each other on select projects
- Wearables and the disaggregation of the smartphone, presumably looking for new ways to exploit the platform and ecosystem
- Supply chain management
- Radical adjacencies such as retailing and indeed mobile and now watches
- Control of all customer experience
3. Google
Google is usually associated with a fairly loose innovation model -the 20% free time its engineers can claim but in fact its innovations are systematic in the infrastructure. This is a comment left by Goolge here on ReThinking Innovation:
We are constantly innovating, figuring out new more efficient ways to remove heat from machines while reducing pollution. We publish our findings, after they have been vetted. After a few years, our
designs start showing up in other companies’ datacenters. We only waste 7-8% of our power on overhead. The norm *used* to be 50-100%.
YouTube was converted to use Google technology. It would not be what it is without Google’s expertise in networking and distributed computing. Android was barely more than an idea when Google merged with it. Google made it what it is.
So there is a strong line of continuous improvement in Google’s infrastructure allied to its larger, better known innovations like driverless cars. Google also works in a lot of adjacencies, going from search and advertising to enterprise apps, to mobile computing, to devices and soon to deliveries.
Advertising appears to give coherence to this but I doubt it does in reality. Google clearly needs to reinvent itself to reduce its advertising dependency. For example it appears unlikely to dominate the domestic TV screen as it has computing, so it will not be as well positioned to offer integrated campaigns. It has through Android and its own apps
business, been able to replicate Apple’s platform and ecosystem
strategy. Arguably it already had a model of that kind with search and SEO.
So its model?
- It is platform and ecosystem-based in its customer facing innovations
- Continuous improvement in infrastructure
- Radical adjacencies to become more integrated (deliveries) and to look for a new disruption (Glass, driverless cars)
- Device innovations, which are proving difficult to generate along with supply chains that it lacks experience of
- Increasingly it is becoming design-centric
- Bench-time – a factor most companies now deprive their engineers of
These models might be about to change. This is what reader Dave Nelson says of the three companies, looking to the future.
“In the future, I think you will see more unified manufacturing where a
company does the hardware and software. Apple thought it could
design hardware and software in house and use standard off the shelf parts but that leads to copy cats because parts are parts. Google thought it could outsource nearly the entire product solely for the search revenue but is now at risk. Samsung did a lot of the hardware and received a huge freebie from Google. All three are now looking at doing more of the product in-house.”
source
forbes.com