ejem innovac

 

o    The set of routines that describe and differentiate the responses that organizations make to the question of structuring and managing the generic model, which we have been looking at in this chapter(see Figure 2.1), provide a description of "how we manage innovation around here." It follows that some routines are better than others in coping with the uncertainties of the outside world, in both the short and the long term.

o    Examples include the following: • Advanced manufacturing technology(AMT -robots, flexible machines, integrated computer control, etc.) [83,84] • Total quality management (TQM) [85,86] • Business process re-engineering (BPR) [87-89] • Benchmarking best practice [90,91] • Quality circles [92,93] • Networking/clustering [94,95] • Knowledge management [96] • Open innovation [97] What is going on here demonstrates well the principles behind behavioral change in organizations.

o    Close analysis of many technological innovations over the years reveals that although there are technical difficulties- bugs to fix, teething troubles to be resolved, and the occasional major technical barrier to surmount-the majority of failures are due to some weakness in the way the process is managed. Success in innovation appears to depend upon two key ingredients-technical resources (people, equipment, knowledge, money, etc.) and the capabilities in the organization to manage them.

o    These patterns reflect an underlying set of shared beliefs about the world and how to deal with it and form part of the organization's culture - "the way we do things in this organization." They emerge as a result of repeated experiments and experience around what appears to work well - in other words, they are learned.

o    Importantly, routines are seen as evolving in the light of experience that works - they become the mechanisms that "transmit the lessons of history." In this sense, routines have an existence independent of particular personnel - new members of the organization learn them on arrival, and most routines survive the departure of individual routines.

o    Building and Developing Routines across the Core Process. Successful innovation management routines are not easy to acquire.

o    Over time, organizational behavior routines create and are reinforced by various kinds of artifacts - formal and informal structures, procedures, and processes that describe "the way we do things around here" and symbols that represent and characterize the underlying routines.

o    In many ways, the innovation process represents the place where Murphy and his associated band of lawmakers hold sway, where if anything can go wrong, there's a very good chance that it will! But despite the uncertain and apparently random nature of the innovation process, it is possible to find an underlying pattern of success.

o    These simple routines need to be integrated into broader abilities, which taken together make up an organization's capability in managing innovation.

o    lnstead, each firm has to find its own way of doing these things - in other words, developing its own particular routines.

o    While there is enormous potential in learning from others, simply copying what seems to work for another organization will not necessarily bring any benefits and may end up costing a great deal and distracting the organization from finding its own ways of dealing with a particular problem.

o    In other words, there was no learning, and no progress towards making them become routines, part of the underlying culture within the firm.

o    Firms with good project management routines are able to codify and pass them on to others via procedures and systems.

• -Rob Perrons, Shell Exploration, USA Success Routines in Innovation Management Successful innovators acquire and accumulate technical resources and managerial capabilities over time; there are plenty of opportunities for learning - through doing, using, working with other firms, asking the customers, and so on - but they all depend upon the readiness of the firm to see innovation less as a lottery than as a process, which can be continuously improved.
• Developing an integrated set of routines is strongly associated with successful innovation management and can give rise to distinctive competitive ability - for example, being able to introduce new products faster than anyone else or being able to use new process technology better [106-108].
• Measuring Innovation Success Before we move to look at examples of successful routines for innovation management, we should pause for a moment and define what we mean by "success." We have already seen that one aspect of this question is the need to measure the overall process rather than its constituent parts.
• (Of course, as we noted earlier, innovation in real life does not conform neatly to this simple representation - and it is rarely a single event but rather a cycle of activities repeated overtime.) The key point is that a number of different actions need to take place as we move through the phases of this model and associated with each are some consistent lessons about effective innovation management routines.
• lt's important to note that even "good" innovation management organizations can lose their touch - for example, 3M, for many years, a textbook case of how to manage the process found itself in difficulties as a result of overemphasis on incremental innovation (driven by a "Six Sigma" culture) at the expense of "breakthrough" thinking.
• Its reflection on the problems this posed and commitment to reshaping its innovation management agenda again underlines the importance of learning and of the idea of "dynamic capability." View 2.1 box gives some examples of the key success factors in innovation as seen by practicing innovation managers.
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• The distinguishing feature is their capability to organize and manage the innovation process in its entirety, from search through selection to effective implementation of new knowledge.
• Type C firms have a well-developed sense of the need for change and are highly capable of implementing new projects and take a strategic approach to the process of continuous innovation.
• There are many examples of firms that have highly developed abilities for managing part of the innovation process but that fail because of a lack of ability in others.
• (We will return to the theme of innovation audits and their role in helping develop capability in Chapter 15.) For our purposes in exploring innovation management throughout the rest of the book, it will be helpful to build on our own simple model (Figure 2.4) and use it to focus attention on key aspects of the innovation management challenge.
• Do we have a clear innovation strategy? Search- how can we find opportunities for innovation? Select -what are we going to do - and why? lmplement- how are we going to make it happen? Capture - how are we going to get the benefits from it? Do we have an innovative organization? FIGURE 2.4 Process model of innovation.
• And central to the discussion is the concept of "complementary assets" -what other elements around the system in which the innovation is created and delivered are hard for others to access or duplicate? This gives rise to the idea of what David Teece [83] termed "appropriability regimes" - how easy or hard is it to extract value from investments in innovation? An inevitable outcome of the launch of an innovation is the creation of new stimuli for restarting the cycle.
• Whether this market is a group of retail consumers or a set of internal users of a new process, the same requirement exists for developing and preparing this market for launch, since it is only when the target market makes the decision to adopt the innovation that the whole innovation process is completed.
• Another problem with this phase is the need to balance the open-ended environmental conditions that support creative behavior with the somewhat harsher realities involved elsewhere in the innovation process.
• We'll return to this theme in Chapter 15, but for now, it is important to stress the p development of innovation management capability as one of learning.
• - John Thesmer, Managing Director Ictal Care Denmark To make an innovation successful, you have to have a clear understanding of the business drivers and constraints being felt by the people on the “coal face” - that is, the folks who will make the decision to use your new technology.
• But learning can also be around the capabilities and routines needed for effective product innovation management.
• Eventually, it is in a form that can be launched into its intended context - internal or external market - and then further knowledge about its adoption (or otherwise) can be used to refine the innovation.
• What Do We Know About Successful Innovation Management? The good news is that there is a knowledge base on which to draw in attempting to answer this question.
• A key challenge in innovation management relates to the clear understanding of what factors shape the "selection environment" and the development of strategies to ensure that their boundaries of this are stretched.
• Capturing Value The purpose of innovating is rarely to create innovations for their own sake, but rather to capture some kind of value from them - be it commercial success, market share, cost reduction or - as in social innovation - changing the world.
• The concept of capability in innovation management also raises the question of how it is developed over time.
• We can explore the implementation phase in a little more detail by considering three core elements - acquiring knowledge, executing the project, and launching and sustaining the innovation.
• Quite apart from the wealth of experience (of success and failure) reported by organizations involved with innovation, there is a growing pool of knowledge derived from research.
• From the various studies of success and failure in innovation, it is possible to construct checklists and even crude blueprints for effective innovation management.
• Most innovations result from the interplay of several forces, some coming from the need for change pulling through innovation, and others from the push that comes from new opportunities.
• The work of Eric von Hippel and others has shown repeatedly that early involvement and allowing them to play an active role in the innovation process leads to better adoption and higher quality innovation.
• At its heart, we have the generic process described earlier, which sees innovation as a core set of activities distributed over time.
• In our terms, success relates to the overall innovation process and its ability to contribute consistently to growth.
• Implement Acquire knowledge Execute the project Launch and sustain the innovation FIGURE 2.6 Key questions in the implement phase .
• In a similar fashion, many studies have shown that product innovation failure is often caused by firms trying to launch products that do not match their competence base [64].
• Such firms (and this is a classic problem of small firm growth) differ from those that recognize in some strategic way the need to change, to acquire and use new knowledge but lack the capability to target their search, or to assimilate and make effective use of new knowledge once identified.
• In some ways, this implementation phase can be seen as one that gradually pulls together different pieces of knowledge and weaves them into an innovation.
• From this knowledge base, it is clear that there are no easy answers and that innovation varies enormously- by scale, type, sector, and so on.
• Given the wide range of signals, it is important for successful innovation management to have well-developed mechanisms for identifying, processing, and selecting information from this turbulent environment.
• As the innovation develops, a continuing thread of problem-finding and solving - getting the bugs out of the original concept - takes place, gradually building up relevant knowledge around the innovation.
• Implementation Having picked up relevant trigger signals and made a strategic decision to pursue some of them, the next key phase is actually turning those potential ideas into some kind of reality - a new product or service, a change in process, a shift in business model, and so on.
• But they lack the capabilities for radical innovation - to redefine markets through new technology or to create new market opportunities.
• successful innovation management is primarily about building and improving effective routines.
• At the early stages, there is high uncertainty - details of technological feasibility, of market demand, of competitor behavior, of regulatory and other influences, and so on - all of these are scarce, and strategic selection has to be based on a series of "best guesses." But gradually over the implementation phase, this uncertainty is replaced by knowledge acquired through various routes and at an increasing cost.
• Over the past SO years or so, there have been many studies of the innovation process, looking at many different angles.
• Where there is a high degree of uncertainty -as is the case with discontinuous innovation conditions - there is a particular need for adaptive strategies, which stress the coevolution of innovation with users, based on a series of "probe and learn" experimental approaches.
• Search The first phase in innovation involves detecting signals in the environment about potential for change.
• The other critical point to emerge from research is that innovation needs managing in an integrated way; it is not enough just to manage or develop abilities in some of these areas.
•  we will consider two sets of such contextual factors: • The strategic context for innovation - how far is there a clear understanding of the ways in which innovation will take the organization forward? And is this made explicit, shared, and "bought into" by the rest of the organization? • The innovativeness of the organization - how far do the structure and systems support and motivate innovative behavior? Is there a sense of support for creativity and risk-taking, can people communicate across boundaries, and is there a "climate" conducive to innovation?
• Beyond the Steady State The model we have been developing in this chapter is very much about the world of repeated, continuous innovation where there is the underlying assumption that we are "doing what we do but better." This is not necessarily only about incremental innovation - itis possible to have significant step changes in product/service offering, process, and so on - but these still take place within an established envelope.
• Key Contextual Influences So far, we have been considering the core generic innovation process as a series of stages distributed over time and have identified key challenges that emerge in their effective management.