Roche’s Product Strategies and Innovative Solutions

Roche is a leading research-focused healthcare company. The tasks of Roche research programs and strategies are those of gaining initial market acceptance and changing habits. They are concerned with creating primary demands for the product, providing customer and consumer information, identifying market segments, gaining market knowledge, soliciting channel support, and promoting to gain a foothold in the marketplace. The uniqueness of Roche is that it specializes in innovative solutions for diagnostic and therapeutic services. The process of delineating opportunities is identified and innovation is perceived in terms of market opportunity (Chell, 67). Fundamental, functional, and adaptive innovations are distinguished. The key activities in the innovation process are delineated: acceptance of change, programmed perception of market needs, relating opportunity and corporate resources, specifying innovative opportunities and strategies, and evaluating, deciding, promoting, and assuring market acceptance.

Roche’s product strategies may be a reaction to competitor’s moves and consist of adjustments of current product lines, or they may involve the development of new products. The former are mainly defensive moves and the latter mainly offensive. Roche uses defensive strategies to improve the profitability of existing lines and develop new products to meet competitors’ lines. However, the offensive strategy of introducing a new product to stimulate a new or unrecognized demand has the greatest payoff potential in future profitability and market position. But staying in business implies that new products will be developed and some will fail. Companies must determine an acceptable failure rate for their new products. Low failure rates are not always complimentary statistics, since they may indicate a lack of innovative ability and risk-taking. Neither is high product failure desirable, because it may reflect too speculative a policy (Johnson et al 87).

Technological innovations help Roche to remain competitive and meet diverse customers’ needs in the pharmaceutical sphere and products for researchers. Roche attempts to recognize failures as early as possible. Sometimes it is even good practice to close out a questionable product — one that might eventually be fairly successful — and shift the resources to another product that seems to be doing quite well. Successful product development requires the utilization of both product differentiation and market segmentation (Johnson et al 87). The former strategy adjusts or bends demand conditions to meet the seller’s conditions. The latter represents a more precise adjustment of products and production to market conditions. Commercialization includes the whole program to market the product. It extends beyond product development in a narrow sense (Riche Home Page 2009).

Production processes and techniques are based on state-of-the-art solutions developed by Roche’s research team. Product-development programs are the foundation of corporate planning since the business strategy is expressed in products. A company is no more successful than its product. Roche supplies unique products for diagnostics including instruments and tests for disease screening, equipment for laboratories, and patient self-management tools (Riche Home Page 2009). Neither a haphazard nor a random activity, it must be planned and programmed. Specific criteria for new products must be laid down, yet the whole new product-development function is one of continuous evaluation and assessment. The impact of nonconformists on general purchase behavior seems relatively small. New products are expected to function within the current social setting and must appeal to the average, well-adjusted personality. The process by which customers accept new items is a complex one comprising several stages. The question has been raised whether we can consume all the new goods and services that can be produced.

Works Cited

Chell, E. 2001, Entrepreneurship: Globalization, Innovation and Development; Thompson.

Johnson, G., Scholes, K., Whittington. R. Exploring Corporate Strategy. Prentice Hall; 8 edition, 2008.

Riche Home Page. 2009.

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