Abstract
This chapter offers the notion of vintage innovation, an innovative approach to improve the customer effectiveness of old products without changing their technical characteristics. The chapter reviews the Saviotti and Metcalfe theoretical framework in order to analyze the key components of technological products (technical characteristics and service characteristics). Backwards compatibility provides interesting opportunities to improve customer effectiveness to date scarcely considered by firms. This form of technological compatibility leads to the phenomenon of vintage innovation. This shows that companies have to focus, paradoxically, their R&D efforts on new technology in order to improve customer effectiveness of declining products. In particular, vintage innovation generates value for companies when users form a community of practice. The chapter ends with the main managerial implications of vintage innovation.
This chapter is based on and extends some elements of the analyses and researches developed by the author in Schiavone (2013a) and Schiavone (2013b).
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- 1.
In Italian, the native idiom of Vico, the theory is named “corsi e ricorsi storici.”
- 2.
Chapter 1 reports a wide description about old product revitalization.
- 3.
From this point the terms “performance” and “service characteristics” are used interchangeably in the chapter.
- 4.
Saviotti and Metcalfe (1984) consider also a third set of product characteristics (irrelevant for the present analysis) in their article: process characteristics, referring to the process by which every product is produced.
- 5.
Information technology scholars use the notion of interoperability in order to define the compatibility between different computers and/or software. Inter-operability, broadly speaking, is “the degree to which diverse systems, organizations, and/or individuals are able to work together to achieve a common goal” (Ide and Pustejovsky 2010).
- 6.
A structural hole is “the separation between non redundant contacts. Non redundant contacts are connected by a structural hole. A structural hole is a relationship of non-redundancy between two contacts” (Burt 1992, p. 18).
- 7.
Christensen (1997) distinguishes between disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation. A disruptive innovation is a new technology which has the potential to revolutionize an industry and, for this reason, many companies tend to ignore it. This type of innovation therefore is similar to the notion of radical innovation (Henderson and Clark 1990). Instead, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value but only evolves existing ones with better value. In this sense it is similar to the notion of incremental innovation (Henderson and Clark 1990).
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Schiavone, F. (2014). Vintage Innovation. In: Communities of Practice and Vintage Innovation. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01902-4_3
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