In April 2008, Nintendo took seventh place in the annual BusinessWeek-Boston Consulting Group ranking of the most innovative companies in the world. Award recognized the company as an innovative power plant design, which challenged the prevailing business model of the video game industry with its new game console, Wii. Game console industry traditionally has entered a new cycle of every five or six years. In 2006, when a new generation of gaming consoles was introduced, Microsoft and Sony continued its previous strategy of increasing the computing power of their new products, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This time, however, Nintendo was planning something else. The Company believes that the video game industry has been focusing too much on the existing players and totally neglecting non-gamers, which could well be the source of future growth. Armed with this insight, Nintendo developed a fundamentally different strategy, producing a Wii, whose processing power has been eclipsed by that on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. However, it soon became obvious that the Nintendo Wii has been a runaway success. How Nintendo achieved this success? Whether the company actually broke the video game industry? What course of action available to competitors from Nintendo? "Hide
by Ali Farhoomand, Havovi Joshi Source: University of Hong Kong, 24 pages. Publication Date: February 10, 2009. Prod. #: HKU814-PDF-ENG
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