Innovation and New Product Development Case Study

AMD: The Customer-centric Innovation Strategies

OR

Abstract:
Jerry Sanders (Sanders) and seven of his friends founded AMD on May 1st 1969. Based in Sunnyvale, California, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) ranks No. 2 in the design and manufacture of PC microprocessors, flash memory chips and embedded processors and generated sales revenue of $5,847.6 million in 2005. As customers sought higher performance, lower cost solutions to help revitalize their business, AMD transformed itself from a perennial also-ran into a formidable threat to the dominance of the industry giant, Intel. AMD made advances against Intel and gained popularity with the success of its Athlon and Opteron chips. AMD employs the path of 'Customer-centric Innovation' to deliver innovative solutions that its customers seek to succeed.

Pedagogical Objectives:

• To understand the evolution of AMD into one of the biggest competitors to industry giant Intel
• To discuss the strategies to outwit an aggressive rival
• To highlight the importance of customer-centric initiatives in technology companies
• To discuss customer-centric innovative strategies initiated by AMD
• To debate whether customer-centric innovative strategies would enable AMD to become stronger, more efficient, more responsive and intensely focused on delivering innovative solutions that its customers seek to succeed.

Keywords : AMD (Advanced Micro Devices); Innovation Management Case Study; Flash memory chips; EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-only Memory); Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited; Spansion; NexGen; 3D! Now technology; MirrorBit; PowerNow Technology; SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory; 'QuantiSpeed' architecture; True performance initiative; China Basic Education Software Company; mySAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management); Prefetching

Contents:

• AMD: A Brief Profile
• Customer-centric Innovation Strategies
• The Competitive Future