Corel Ventura SF2（科立尔文图拉SF2）.pdfVIP

Product innovation 1 2 Product Innovation Product innovation means different things to different people. Some, for example, tend to think in terms of a product which is ‘first of its kind’, whether in the UK or in some larger market. Naturally, few small firms achieve innovation of that degree. And such radical innovation is not necessarily more important than the steady, incremental improvements to existing ranges of products, which far more firms take part in. Indeed, since about 1970 there seems to have been a steady swing towards product improvement rather than totally new products, 1 throughout the industrial world . We felt there was good reason, therefore, to adopt a broad rather than a narrow view of product innovation. As we stated briefly in the Introduction, we defined it as development of new products, changes in design of established products, or use of new materials or components in manufacture of established products. In other words, anything which is new to the business and its product range is counted as innovation, even if similar products are available elsewhere or if the change is an incremental one. How much product innovation? The senior executives responding to the survey were told our definition and asked to look back over the preceding two years (a period finishing in late 1985). They were asked, first of all, whether they had brought in any change in products within this period. We found that some product innovation, in our broad sense, had been carried through in this period by 57 per cent of our whole UK 14 Product innovation sample. In other words, out of every 10 small firms, six were likely to be (to some degree)