Necessity Breeds Opportunity: Constraints, Innovation And Competitive Advantage

This paper looks at ways companies can drive innovation to address external constraints and sidestep trade-offs between efficiency and responsiveness. When companies fail in the Indian market, they often blame their difficulties on either external constraints like power shortages, high costs of transportation, and talent shortages that affect their operations or on issues stemming from poor access to products and services that affect their customers. Given these constraints, companies believe they can achieve process efficiency only at the expense of customer responsiveness, and vice versa, so they design their improvements accordingly. Companies can identify the right approach for innovation by analyzing their constraints and then identifying unique innovation opportunities to improve both efficiency and responsiveness.