TESLA
Product innovation
Tesla is world first commercially successful purely electric car. It continually committed to product innovation and technological improvements to enhance the competitive capacity of products. Tesla’s most attractive innovations are the powerful electric motors, long range on a single charge, the charging technology as well as the automatic system. Tesla Motors very focused on innovation in integration design, not only includes ‘cell’ pack, but also includes charge and discharge control etc in order to ensure battery safe and reliable operation.
Tesla Model S is the first one to plug-in electric vehicle fleet and reached the 1 billion electric miles milestone. It is an evolution in automobile engineering. Comparing gasoline internal combustion engine with hundreds of moving parts, Tesla electric motors have only one moving piece: the rotor. As a result, Model S acceleration is instantaneous, silent and smooth. Step on the accelerator and in as little as 2.8 seconds Model S is travelling 60 miles per hour, without hesitation, and without a drop of gasoline.
Model S did improvement innovation on conventional all-wheel drive systems which make the car unparalleled traction control in all conditions. With two motors, one in the front and one in the rear, Model S digitally and independently controls torque to the front and rear wheels. Electric all-wheel drive innovation makes Model S motor lighter, smaller and more efficient than its rear wheel drive counterpart, providing both improved range and faster acceleration.
Process innovation
Tesla did process innovation in terms of changing the ways in which they create innovation and deliver their products. They changed their innovation process from the begging close innovation to nowadays open innovation.
Tesla built partnership with other companies such as Panasonic, Daimler AG, Toyota. Through cooperation with these companies and some of the R&D teams, Tesla did really successful open innovation on their product and technology. On the one hand, through this process innovation, Tesla gained more resources and help from outside of the company. This makes more possibility of bring new things into Tesla and extend their product life cycle. In addition, doing open innovation also decreased their innovation cost and also benefit from each other. On the other hand, Tesla can gain profit from selling their patens. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said ‘Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology’.
https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:635929/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Paradigm innovation
Tesla sends a new concept to customers that the improvement of quality life should not be built on environmental damage. And Tesla itself makes this in reality that their products make quality of life and environmental protection win-win. Tesla car is the first car that does not need petrol and gas, the special demand of electric ask the society built electric power station. As a result, governments and societies need to build a totally new social infrastructure construction car system which may cause the revolution of infrastructure. However, social infrastructure construction change may cause lots of problems. Due to this feature, Tesla made a paradigm innovation on people’s mind and let them accept this new type of car mentally. They provided fantastic car test service for customers and promote their environment friendly and supper convenient concept by different social media. At the earlier adopter stage, only a few of people buy Tesla car and electric car charger. However, in the process of moving from the early adopter stage to the majority adopter stage, many governments such as America realized that there are more and more people having environmental protect concept in their mind and tends to buy electric car nowadays, thus electric charge power station may becoming essential in the societies. More importantly, in order promote the ‘green’ concept and leads a healthy life style trend in societies, most of the government are happy to help Tesla to promote their cars. And more than 30 countries start to build electric power station in rent years.
Position innovation
Tesla created a new market for the Luxury long-range electric automobiles and become the market leader in this area. The new market Tesla created is different from the original petrol vehicles, the less expensive electric vehicles and also the gas-powered vehicles. Their target customers are people who have the advanced green environment concepts in mind. For example, Tesla used blue ocean strategy created a many blue oceans for their companies.
For example, usually green car and sports car are separate and target different group of customers. Tesla combined ‘green’ and ‘sports’ together and created the first type of ‘sports green’ car for satisfying the people who want both, thus they have a different approach to enter the market. However, in recent years, their strategy was also to go from expensive to affordable so that they can cover the risks with high price. Knowing that there would be people who will see the company’s massage within this price range, they were able to test out their new technology that will allow bringing more affordable cars in the nearest future.
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