Starbucks Innovation

Starbucks – House of Innovation

Review the 2012 list of the top 50 organizations for innovation and technology, and you will see Starbucks. How does the company continually succeed in making the list? The business has fostered a culture of innovation. Top executives stay true to company values, and this filters outward throughout the organization. Company leaders focus on the ever-changing needs of customers, place emphasis on social consciousness, sustainable development, and its external environment. The company is not afraid of risk and embraces challenges that uncertainty creates by thinking outside the box, and in so doing sets itself apart from competitors and builds a positive reputation.

Innovation is the process whereby organizations use skills and resources to either develop new goods and services or introduce new production and operating systems to respond to the changing needs of customers (Jones, 2010). Much of Starbuck’s success hinges on incremental innovations (Jones, 2010). The company has one ear firmly planted on technological ground and has harassed incremental technological change (Jones, 2010). From a digital perspective, the Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) offers new, localized, and valuable content from the biggest names in news and entertainment. The SDN offers free subscriptions to The Economist, Wall Street Journal, for example. Brotman (Chief Digital Officer) states that SDN coupled with world class mobile platforms and the company’s in-house Wi-Fi strategy offers customers an experience second to none (Kanani, 2012).

The company pays heed to customer preferences. For years Starbucks has maintained that dark roasts are much better than light rendering the business with the formidable task of convincing internal and external audiences that its lighter roast “Blonde” stood up to the company’s high standards. R&D revealed through the consumer research “sensory preference” map that 40% of U.S. coffee drinkers prefer lighter blends...