The Development Of Boeing Company In The View Of Innovation

Aviation industry for civilian use is regarded as one of the most important high tech industries, and is also a mark of a country's military power, technological ability and a nation's power as a whole. The Boeing Company, as the leader of the civilian aviation industry, its history of development reflects the evolution of this high-tech industry; therefore, my essay will follow its path of development, and try to find some regularities and characteristics from the prospective of innovation.And I will divide chronologically its history into four parts with three important events, that is, the end of the world war two in 1945, the civilian order surpassing that of the military in 1964, and Air Bus's victory over McDonnell Douglas in the sales of civilian airplanes in 1991.The first period: 1916-1945The Boeing Company started its business in the domain of producing postal aero transport and then transferred to the military sphere in response to the demand of two world wars, during which Boeing had become the biggest manufacturing company of the military aero planes.And in that period, with the strong support from government and military, Boeing designed and manufactured the first civilian airplane, it combined the most advanced technologies at that time, including the technology of aluminum alloy, aircraft design as well as new engine cowling, and finally released a passenger plane B247.Although B247 was the first passenger plane in the world, it ended up with failure, which was because MD had produced a passenger plane DC-2 with better performance quickly following the coming up of the B247. While Boeing ad been little influenced by this failure because its main market was in military. And thanks to its highly-developed technological power in military aero planes, its ability to design civilian aero planes had been well preserved and expanded greatly after the WW II.The second period: 1946-1964After the WW II, a great amount of demand in military was cancelled, therefore, not only Boeing, but also the whole America aviation industry had suffered a lot. In order to avoid the shrinkage in this industry, just the same as what had happened after WW I, America government began to lead the manufacturing companies to the civilian industry.Against that background, Boeing transferred to the civilian aviation industry. It first took full use of the technology of reaction engine developed during the war period, and manufactured a large passenger aircraft B707, which was able to fly across the Atlantic as well as the Americas.B707 had benefited a lot from the government and military. Firstly, Boeing had earned a huge sum of money during WW II in the manufacturing of military aero planes, which provided a strong support to the B707, secondly, the design of jet had originally inspired by the German technology, in fact, B707 was based on the improvement of KC-135, which was a military airplane. In addition, over 40% order of B707 was actually from military department. And all this constituted the success of B707.The third period: 1965-1991In this period, Boeing ranked foremost in civilian aviation industry all over the world. Directed towards varied demands in the market, it designed a series of aero planes from B737 to B767 and many other derivative planes, it also carried out the research and development of SST which was funded by the us government.In the previous stage of that period, Boeing had a rather positive view towards the future of the market on the basis of success of B707 and B727, and thus was a little over advanced in the formulation of plan. When the economic situation wasn't as prosperous as expected, Boeing was on the verge of bankrupt because of its huge executive system and scale of production, it could only manage to survive relying on laying off employees and changing the line of production. It was not until the end of 1970, the situation began to take a turn for the better.After that, Boeing started to adopt a relatively conservative strategy in technology, and the two aero planes manufactured in 1980s , reflected its fear of making breakthrough, which had actually set aside some market share to the Air Bus, result in its rise in 1990s.The fourth period: 1992 until nowThe Air Bus surpassed MD in 1992, and became the world's second biggest civilian manufacturer of aero planes. In the end of 20^th century, it undoubtedly turned to a powerful competitor of Boeing and always kept pace with the latter. While Boeing had lost much market share as a result of its conservative policy, it could only maintain its dominant position in NG B737 and B777. But from the beginning of 21^th century, Boeing began to make a change, it showed its determination in innovation, for example, B787 had adopted a bold development in technology, especially the use of complex material over more than 50% of the body of airplane, including the parts which received the most weight. However, the progress in innovation had led to other problems like the delay in turning over the product. To give an example, Boeing is still unable to bring out B787 to the airline company even the expiration date has already passed. As for result of the competition between Boeing and Air Bus, it is still up in the air and up to the market to decide.From what has been mentioned, we can see that three man factors has played very important roles in the process of innovation, that is, technology, market and politics. In fact, technology functions as the basis of innovation, and market runs the final judgment of the innovation, while political factors permeate the above two. And Boeing's development and success is in reality the result of cross correlation of these three factors.