how to protect innovation when strategic cooperation when there is a conflict?

Nintendo is innovative as a market leader in the video game sector. However, it is him who introduced a very strong competitior SONY into the industry, which became a 'greatest challenge' for them, owing to their conflicts of vision.
In the course of innovation, esp. when you have to lean on other strategic partners' technology, it is always a key concern to seek ways to make protection to maintain know-how and market status. In this sector, I agree with the disruptive technology mentioned in the Exhibit 1.

Michelle Hong, Baozhu wrote:Nintendo is innovative as a market leader in the video game sector. However, it is him who introduced a very strong competitior SONY into the industry, which became a 'greatest challenge' for them, owing to their conflicts of vision.
In the course of innovation, esp. when you have to lean on other strategic partners' technology, it is always a key concern to seek ways to make protection to maintain know-how and market status. In this sector, I agree with the disruptive technology mentioned in the Exhibit 1.

Actually even if Nintendo didn't introduce Sony into the video game market, the two giant software console manufactures Sony and Microsoft will join in the competition, because they had realized that the blooming attractive and profitable video game market had influenced its traditional PC game and multimedia market. It is just question of when they would be there. I agree that Iwata lead right direction for the company by its disruptive strategy at that time. Market result also reflected that he was correct, Nintendo came back its ruler position. But I doubt when I finished reading the case, this strategy and concept, is not diffcult to be copied, maybe not by Sony or Microsoft, and its targeted customers can switch easily to other new exciting solutions, just for example, Apple iPhone, when it was released, it really took a big part of Nintendo's customers, even though Nintendo doesn't admit, but it happens. So, company should adjust its strategy at different times as the competition rules keep on changing.

Song wrote:

Michelle Hong, Baozhu wrote:Nintendo is innovative as a market leader in the video game sector. However, it is him who introduced a very strong competitior SONY into the industry, which became a 'greatest challenge' for them, owing to their conflicts of vision.
In the course of innovation, esp. when you have to lean on other strategic partners' technology, it is always a key concern to seek ways to make protection to maintain know-how and market status. In this sector, I agree with the disruptive technology mentioned in the Exhibit 1.

Actually even if Nintendo didn't introduce Sony into the video game market, the two giant software console manufactures Sony and Microsoft will join in the competition, because they had realized that the blooming attractive and profitable video game market had influenced its traditional PC game and multimedia market. It is just question of when they would be there. I agree that Iwata lead right direction for the company by its disruptive strategy at that time. Market result also reflected that he was correct, Nintendo came back its ruler position. But I doubt when I finished reading the case, this strategy and concept, is not diffcult to be copied, maybe not by Sony or Microsoft, and its targeted customers can switch easily to other new exciting solutions, just for example, Apple iPhone, when it was released, it really took a big part of Nintendo's customers, even though Nintendo doesn't admit, but it happens. So, company should adjust its strategy at different times as the competition rules keep on changing.

Agreed with your points. The first point is that you can NOT block any competitor entering into the market. What you can do is to make yourself better maybe through the continuous innovation strategy. The second point is that the player should adopt the appropriate innovation strategy to win bigger market share at the different market phase. How to adopt the appropriate innovation strategy will be a big topics. As discussed in the case, maybe the company leader can contribute much to this. However, the best choice may be to make out the best infrastructure instead of depending on some key position to produce it. Anyway, there will be a lot of topics for this in the future cases in the CBI course.

Hi JinDong,
I got one question mark for your first point "you can NOT block any competitor entering into the market".
Actually every competitor is looking for the different ways to build technical, marketing, political, legal, patent, pricing, brand equity almost everything to form high ground for the entries, or even each other. The key is whether the entry cost is higher than their profit point. If so, it's still quite practicable to block the new comers.

P.S. Ques: why there're two authors for this topic ??

Innovation should be regarded as progressive activities which enable both or more cooperative sides to be benefited. Therefore, if there is really a conflict happening, all sides should work together to remove this blockage to let the innovation keep going forward. This is also why cooperation can be called as “cooperation. Or both or more sides are not in cooperation and they can’t be called as cooperation sides...

Michelle Hong, Baozhu wrote:Nintendo is innovative as a market leader in the video game sector. However, it is him who introduced a very strong competitior SONY into the industry, which became a 'greatest challenge' for them, owing to their conflicts of vision.
In the course of innovation, esp. when you have to lean on other strategic partners' technology, it is always a key concern to seek ways to make protection to maintain know-how and market status. In this sector, I agree with the disruptive technology mentioned in the Exhibit 1.

I partly agree with Micheal. However, when Nintendo turned to Phillips for CD-ROM corperation, it came up a question why Phillips didn't get the same chance. As we know about Sony, it's a traditional radio and tape recorder company, it has a nature advantage on the format which comply the requiremnet of electronic techneque development. In another hand, it is the weakness for Nintendo. So, to protect only seems not enough to prevent the pertential competitors enter the market, to integrate more strength to avoid short slab. To enhance it, the horizontal effort should also be implemented. Like what Nintendo did to implement disruptive innovation to his management concept.