Innovation path and contingencies in the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program

Abstract

The innovation paths in Complex Products and Systems (CoPS) industries are negotiated ex-ante among stakeholders, in projects or small batches, unlike mass production industries. Organizations dealing with CoPS must sharp their project portfolio to secure their operations and deploy their development strategy while facing diverse natures of project uncertainties. Literature is still evolving with empirical studies to master this critical challenge. The diamond approach for innovation and project management appraises uncertainty dimensions in projects to infer their contingencies and to examine portfolios for innovation. This research applied the diamond approach in a case study to reveal how the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program overcome the above challenge. Results show the categorization for each space mission, a comparative analysis of how they contributed to the program objectives, the identification of strategic and operational projects, and depicted innovation patterns across the satellite product families. The research explored a market innovation of a sensor conceived specially to enhance a deforestation detection alert system to the Amazon biome. The diamond approach was valuable to perform this analysis and could be improved to represent the specificities of innovation types in complex systems. Organizations may benefit from this research by using successful strategies and lessons learned to address the above challenge.