Case Study Luxor Technologies

This week case is about Luxor technologies, a company that for four years (1992-1996) grew exponentially thanks to a strong technical community that produced low cost, high quality applications of the state of the art technology. Their production was characterized by secrecy, and they never shared license with any other company. More than that, all their complete production was from their own shelf in order to protect the patent. Their success allowed them to dismiss the need for technical risk management on the company, even when their product did not reached the desired specifications.

By the end of 1996 Luxor technology became aware of the advances of their competitors, and it was estimated that by 1998 Luxor will no longer be a market

leader.
In 1999 Luxor outsource to measure the potential damage for the company which concluded pointing out important technical risks for the company. By this year, competitors had already caught up to Luxor and the dilemma was to continue as followers, or to fight to keep being leaders on the market.
Two reports were produced to determine the impact of deciding to keep working to maintain the company as leaders of their market: the marketing report point out the possible limited growth of the company, the change in quality and costs of their products, and the need to outsource. The engineering department report was mainly about making more investments for R&D, and acquiring personnel from competitors.