Innovation Management

Innovation Management

Innovation Management

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the effect of significant technology innovation on the managers. The firm which I selected for this paper in order to make an analysis is SKY. SKY is the television broadcasting organization and is very successful. The main functions of SKY are to distribute the local and overseas programme content. The company performs the functions through the digital satellite network. The main revenue of SKY comes from subscription fees, advertising sales and installation fees. The company has also expanded its business in 2006 and purchased the free-to-air broadcaster Television.

Innovation Practice used By Company

Strong incumbents have significant advantages in adopting competence- enhancing innovations relative to weaker incumbents. Their accumulated experience and preceding resources provide powerful incumbents with the capacity to recognize and act on innovation opportunities. Thus, firms with strong initial capabilities have notable advantages in adopting innovations that leverage existing skills and resources (Butler, 2003, p. 84). They can adopt technological change through recombination, integration, and reconfiguration of existing skills and resources. Despite these advantages, powerful incumbents regularly face challenges to their position when innovations enter their industry. Prior research on innovation is broad and covers several research areas such as strategy, economics, marketing, and organizations. This review on innovation focuses on the link between innovation and path-dependence. Knight (1967) defines innovation as “the adoption of a change which is new to an organization and to the relevant environment” (478). Similarly, Tushman, (2007) speak of innovation as “an idea, practice or material artifact perceived as new by the relevant unit of adoption” (2). Thus, these researchers view the adoption process as innovation itself, whereas Simcoe (2006) defines innovation more broadly as “the generation, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, processes, products or services” (2). This selection of definitions of innovation already shows that innovation is a concept of multiple dimensions: innovation may be, on the one hand, the design or introduction of a new service, product, or process, and on the other hand, the reorganization or improvement of existing products, services, or processes. Maula, (2006), for instance, calls innovation the “carrying out of new combinations” (65-66). Moreover, research on innovation spans different levels of analysis: the population, organizational, individual, and process level of innovation. Innovations are not homogeneous, but differ between radical and incremental innovations, administrative and technical innovations, product and process innovations, and competence-enhancing and competence-destroying innovations. Radical innovations introduce fundamental changes in a firm's activities, whereas incremental innovations affect an organization's practice or products to a lesser degree. Competence-enhancing innovations build on and leverage prior firm capabilities, skills, and know-how and are thus path-dependent, whereas competence- destroying innovations render existing capabilities and competencies obsolete (Laursen, 2006, p. 131). Moreover, innovations can be architectural changing the links between individual components while keeping the components themselves intact. Often innovations address different areas of an organization: administrative innovations affect organizational structures and administrative processes, whereas technical innovations relate to services, products, and the technology involved in producing ...