Reflection on Sara Kaplan’s Lecture

About: Innovation as a social problem

Mohammad Allahyari
Uppsala University
October, 2022

International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) was a famous company and it was
supposed to be around forever until 1990. The growth of new technology innovations and the
entrance of personal computers, which could be a signal, caused a considerable loss of money
to this company, and many employees were laid off.
Using this example as a case study, Sara Kaplan pointed out that it is not the companies'
capability to respond to the technological change but their cognition about how it will
happen. While she was talking about the Innovation S-carve chart, which is related to suitable
timing to introduce new products or services to customers, she emphasized that if the
companies could change their mindset about their business and the more that new
technologies are taken seriously, especially by senior leaderships or shareholders, the more
it is possible to enter these new technologies and it would survive the company. It means that
people think, not firms. It implies that these companies accept the transformation as a part
of their destiny and will be able to keep people employed. In addition, people have the chance
to shift their skills and adapt to changes to remain at their job in comparison with companies
avoid talking about negative things that might cause tremendous changes in their
organization and others that everyone assumed that someone else was the change agent
which was mentioned in Stupidity Paradox and each of these mistakes has the potential to
lead to significant long-term failures.