Boeing: more than just an aircraft manufacturer

Temporal linkage essentially means that we want to extend our offerings in time. So, we take an existing product and its life cycle and we seek to find if there are breaks or gaps in the product's life cycle. So, we want to look at the complete chain of activities around a discreet customer set or a product life cycle and we want to identify breaks or gaps in this activity chain to highlight areas for potential expansion. So, consider again an example or like a car. The car's life cycle starts with the purchase process and extends through the entire consumption life cycle. We want to look at this interim life cycle and find if there are gaps. For example, in the purchase process, there may be gaps. A customer may go to a dealer to buy a car, and in the purchase process there may be some hassles that the customer is experiencing. How do we buy insurance? How do we buy new services such as traffic navigation services that are starting to crop up? The current product business model may not be delivering it. So, temporal linkage is about finding these gaps or breaks in the activity chain and filling them with new innovative ideas. A good example of this type of

temporal linkage comes from the American company Boeing, the aerospace company. We all know Boeing as a company that sells big passenger planes like the Boeing 747 and the 767 and so on. But did you know that Boeing gets a bulk of its revenues from developing and launching temporarily linked products and services? For example, Boeing not only designs and manufactures planes, it also finances the sale of planes and in some cases even operates the planes, repairs them for its customers, maintains them, upgrades them and resells them, and modifies the plane, buys some of the planes back. So, there is a whole set of activities that Boeing engages in which may be invisible to the popular press in the marketplace. This is very Illustrative because in the last few years a big portion of Boeing's revenues have come from these temporally linked services. There are many other examples of companies doing such temporally linked new product and service innovation, which has given them significant growth in revenues and market share expansion over time.