Corning Glass
Case Studies
Corning Glass
Background
Corning Glass is a large, multinational organization involved in glass and related products with an increasing emphasis on high-value, technologically-specialized products, many of which are now part of joint-venture programmes and developments.
Innovation ‘Claim to Fame’
This firm is another of the ‘100 club’, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pioneer in process innovation enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, but in the twentieth century moved into developments of specialized glasses which led through to a variety of product/process innovation links. It has successfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its core products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter new and more difficult fields in which it can preserve competitive advantage.
Its consistent investment in R&D has meant it has a ‘technology till’ into which it has been able to dip each time the company has faced crisis. At first perhaps by accident but in more recent times as a function of strategic design, they have built a capability for reinventing themselves – moving from a glassmaker to a fibreglass pioneer to a key player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.
How Do They Manage Innovation?
Corning’s history is one of continuous innovation, much of it around process, but one which is also punctuated by breakthrough shifts into new and key areas. They have increasingly come to use external partners bringing new and often very different knowledge sets and have learnt to let go of their earlier reliance on doing it all in-house. Similarly they began life as a technology push company but some big mistakes, such as their expensive failure in trying to create a technology-driven market for automotive safety glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more market-linked organization. A key stage came in the 1980s when they recognized that growth and
Corning Glass
Background
Corning Glass is a large, multinational organization involved in glass and related products with an increasing emphasis on high-value, technologically-specialized products, many of which are now part of joint-venture programmes and developments.
Innovation ‘Claim to Fame’
This firm is another of the ‘100 club’, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pioneer in process innovation enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, but in the twentieth century moved into developments of specialized glasses which led through to a variety of product/process innovation links. It has successfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its core products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter new and more difficult fields in which it can preserve competitive advantage.
Its consistent investment in R&D has meant it has a ‘technology till’ into which it has been able to dip each time the company has faced crisis. At first perhaps by accident but in more recent times as a function of strategic design, they have built a capability for reinventing themselves – moving from a glassmaker to a fibreglass pioneer to a key player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.
How Do They Manage Innovation?
Corning’s history is one of continuous innovation, much of it around process, but one which is also punctuated by breakthrough shifts into new and key areas. They have increasingly come to use external partners bringing new and often very different knowledge sets and have learnt to let go of their earlier reliance on doing it all in-house. Similarly they began life as a technology push company but some big mistakes, such as their expensive failure in trying to create a technology-driven market for automotive safety glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more market-linked organization. A key stage came in the 1980s when they recognized that growth and