June 2010, less than six months since Steve Job announced the launch of the i-Pad an innovation creating a new product category. Since then, the industry had moved extremely quickly. After 80 days, Apple announced the sale of more than 3 million iPads, with major production bottlenecks restricting market expansion. Since then, more than 20 competing products had been announced, including some from major firms like Sony, HP, Lenovo or Dell computers. These facts indicated that products, and more specifically hardware innovation, would accelerate in the coming years. As usual in the consumer electronics business this was an important signal that production volumes associated with a market surge, would greatly benefit from economies of scales. It also meant that products and technologies that were once niche-oriented would quickly become mainstream and consumer-oriented.
For LUCID managers, this was a major signal. The different types of software developed over the last ten years were, to a large extent, linked with technical specificities that only innovative hardware used to provide. During a strategic meeting, the company’s top management questioned the assumptions made and challenged the strategy at the outset of the second phase of market entry
Written by Bernard Surlemont, Fabrice Pirnay and Emilie Vandermeiren from the University of Liège. Download case and teaching note at www.thecasecentre.org or request them from F.Pirnay@ulg.ac.be.
