Disruptive process innovation in semiconductor industry

Abstract

Firms concentrate more in capturing market by performing product innovations as their key strength. However the key to increase the market share is in their strategy: apart from enhancing the product performance they should concurrently focus in the process innovation, which involves in both technological and business processes. Earlier researches have shown disruptive innovation as a distinct difference from the continuous and radical innovation in product development. However in this study it is shown that it can be extended to process type innovation of high tech industries. For every product there is a close relationship between the product development and its manufacturing process, hence knowledge transfer and technology diffusion between the two teams is crucial to explore and exploit each other's strength. Secondly, to enable process innovation, emphasis should be made to introduce the concept of modularity and flexibility in a product's manufacturing process. Accordingly, this paper introduces a framework for concurrent product and process development that will help a firm to achieve a highest level in its competitive strategy. © 2007 IEEE.