Taking Advantage of Adversarial Demographic Changes to Innovate Your Own Business

E. Osono
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E. Osono: Hitotsubashi University

Chapter 27 in The Silver Market Phenomenon, 2008, pp 391-413 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Any company faces the challenge of adapting to demographic change. In this chapter, we focus on adversarial change. What if a new customer segment emerges but has a very different set of needs? What if the growing customer segment brings subtle shortcomings in your offerings to the surface? Such is often the case with the silver market segment. These changes bring with them great opportunities for the company to innovate itself. The question is how? The distance of the organizational units and the leaders who are in charge of both the new and old businesses is critical. Also, when a company starts a new business, it has to carefully manage these three processes, namely: borrowing, forgetting, and learning. Focusing on organizational distance and the three processes, we have conducted comparative case studies of Toyota’s adaptation to demographic changes in the USA, which has led to an insight about how organizational distance has contributed to innovation.

Keywords: Organizational Distance; Baby Boomer; Customer Segment; Comparative Case Study; Sales Representative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-75331-5_27

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-75331-5_27

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