Untitled - Ministerstwo Rozwoju Regionalnego

this theory, a natural course of development of a given market with no innovations
is a shift from many competing entities to their limited number or even to
a monopoly. This results from a general need for cutting down costs. At a certain
stage, the only way to reduce costs is to combine business entities in order to
achieve economies of scale. The survey shows that there is strong competition
within the sector, particularly in road and air transport. What has caused this
situation is innovations: the monopoly collapses when new inventions appear,
breaking the monopolist’s petrified offer (the monopolist, as the only transport
service provider, has no incentive to introduce improvements), and as the inventions
are improved, competitiveness grows stronger. In the competitive
transport sector, the dominating type of competitiveness is most important; if
competition concerns quality and prices, the tendency to introduce innovations
is stronger 2 . Then the innovative risk regarded as equivalent to the technological
risk translates, on the one hand, into the hazard of stronger competition that
will be more effective because of the introduction of new solutions, and on the
other – into the hazard of the company’s own technological underdevelopment.
There are four kinds of errors enterprises make, becoming vulnerable to the
innovative risk in its technological form. Firstly, they are mistakes in development
strategies which make technological development impossible. Secondly,
there is lack of vision, which means the inability to adapt new discoveries to innovative
business operations. Thirdly, we can say a company lacks vision when
it does not see possible relations between the existing technology and innovations,
and the impact they can have on the market, population, culture, customers’
habits. A significant number of transport devices and appliances were invented
by individuals, i.e. innovators who took the risk of innovation on their
own, and in the beginning were often rejected by the transport market. For example,
when it produced its first automobiles, the Daimler company was considered
flippant, and its product a fad; great success of the aeroplane started in
the workshops of French and German aviation pioneers and in a bicycle workshop
owned by the Wright brothers in the USA. The fourth mistake is lack of resilience
necessary for the implementation of one’s own good project. Usually,
the introduction of an innovative idea encounters many obstacles, particularly
when it goes off the beaten track. Determination is a precondition for outrunning
the competitors.
However, it would be over-simplifying to reduce the innovative risk solely
to its technological dimension, although it is usually a critical element in all innovations.
Apart from technologies, other elements include refinement of procedures
and changes in management systems. All these elements of innovative
risk can be defined through factors that generate them.
2 See: P. Aghion, P. Howitt, A Model of Growth through Creative Destruction. ”Econometrica”, No. 60,
1992, pp. 323-351.
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