Étude de l'entreprise Dyson (document en anglais)

Dyson Case Study Essay

Introduction

In “Inside Dyson: a distinctive company?”, Shepherd et al. (2011) gives details of the secret of Dyson’s success – the company specializing in innovative, design-heavy vacuum cleaners and other household appliances. The successes and failures of Dyson’s design efforts (from their successful vacuums to the 3-in-1 vacuums that did not test well with customers) are explored, as well as their unique perspective on business, which puts quality and innovation above anything else.

1. Using frameworks from the chapter, analyze the strategic capabilities of Dyson.

The strategic capabilities of Dyson revolve primarily around a resource-based view of the strategy with a heavy focus on engineering design; they spend a tremendous amount of time developing and engineering prototypes for household products that seek to provide a twist to the typical device (e.g., vacuum cleaners that provide smooth turning around the corners, oscillating fans that “multiply” air, etc.) This creates a niche in what can be an overly-saturated market. Providing a unique spin of this sort on a product can offer tremendous advantages. Combine this with state-of-the-art, sleek design elements and bright, colorful exteriors, and Dyson creates a number of high-end, well-sought-after appliances. Dyson invests heavily in Chinese and Asian manufacturing in order to make their products cheaper, so that they can maintain profit margin benchmarks. This emphasis on design in their organizational planning means not as many products being manufactured. But what they do sell they sell to a target market at higher prices.

Given the innovation that is present in Dyson’s business strategy, it is quite clear that their strategic capability is high, even though the risks can be high as well due to the experimental and ‘out there’ nature of their products which may be too daunting for normal consumers.

The strategic capabilities are a set of capacities, resources, and skills that create a long-term competitive advantage for an organization.

In this case study, the Dyson’s company is present worldwide, in particular in 46 countries and is supplying competitive market such as Japan, USA, China. In addition, products are marketed as innovative, robust, different and more efficient than the other companies’ products. Each product proposed by Dyson is distinctive.

Most importantly, the company mainly focuses on the engineering and design of its products. These two points are the real strength and make the difference of Dyson. Indeed their investment in R&D has quadrupled in between 2004 and 2009 in order to stay competitive. There is a strong company spirit / corporate spirit in Dyson R&D, they encourage engineers to develop prototypes and push them to create innovation.

Half of the profits are reinvested in the research and into new ideas, prototypes.

Dyson’s strategy is also to promote the idea that every Dyson’s product is an innovation.

Finally Dyson believes in the protection of its patent in order to maintain is competitiveness. This is the reason why Dyson is not subcontracting the manufacturing of its products (unlike Apple for instance) and is managing both design engineering and manufacturing.

2. To what extent do you think competitors can imitate

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