INNOVATION EVALUATION AND MANAGEMENT

Critically evaluating the claim that any organisation can learn to be innovative

Innovation Evaluation and Management

Introduction

Managing innovation in a competitive environment requires the existence of perfect capabilities for retaining stability and generating new capabilities in keeping with discontinuous change requirements (Utterback, 1994). There is a need to evolve a suitable strategy to handle this obvious impossibility in a firm's context. That the former concern relating to management of continuity is important for business continuity has been underscored for three reasons:

From the knowledge management and organisational culture perspective,

For stability-restoring and effective recovery management from situation of crisis, and

In relation to the impact on organisational inactivity (Kim and Mauborgne, 2005).

The latter concern, focusing on management of change, has resulted in several important theories for effective organisational change management processes. In actual practice, both continuity and change dimensions need be tackled and balanced by firms to manage innovation so that the firm's overall performance benefits, apart from its innovation performance. The concept of innovation and innovative strategies will be discussed including the possibilities of learning and implementing an innovative strategy by an organisation. (Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2009)

Discussion

Innovation is the successful application of new ideas, techniques, methods and technologies in order to produce some measure of positive benefit over present concepts. Innovation involves using creativity to produce solutions that differ from the status, however, innovation is greater than the act of simply developing new ideas. It is the successful application and the diffusion of these ideas throughout society.

Innovation will be the key for all organizational systems if the management is able to move into a more sustainable mode of strategic planning to embed and promote innovation in the organization. The problem is certainly not the complexity of the fact that innovation cannot be learned, but it is the possibility of attaining and innovative organization that is constantly looking forward to innovate itself to attain competitive advantage. (Mintzberg, 1994)

Innovation

An inventor is someone who develops a new technology or idea, whereas an innovator is a person who manages to make the technology or idea work in practice. This was well explained by Jan Fagerman, who states that “an important distinction is normally made between invention and innovation. Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process, while innovation is the first attempt to carry it out into practice.”

While innovation can broadly be described as the successful introduction of something new, Joseph Schumpeter defined innovation as being in one of five classes:

New goods; introducing new products and services to the market.

New methods; developing a new way of doing something.

New markets; the development of a new marketplace for products or services.

New sources; exploiting new resources of raw materials or components—whether that resource is one that exists and has not previously been utilized, or whether it has to be created.

New organisation; reorganizing or configuring a market, industry or organisation to work in a different way. (Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2009)

Techniques for Innovation Management

All innovative ideas get an organisation a step ...