INNOVATION:-

Innovation:-

            Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field. One might say that the first telephone was an invention, the first cellular telephone either an invention or an innovation, and the first smartphone an innovation.

The importance of innovation:-

       At this moment, we are positioned in a fast-paced environment where technology is advancing and globalization is increasing. This means that distances only get shorter, and as a result, competition is increasing, customer expectations are more demanding, and disruptions in the economy are more likely to occur.

For a business or an organization to realize competitive advantages, it should be able to adapt to the changing trends and new generations. Innovations apply to management and organizations on all levels, sizes and operating in all industries.

Innovations create bigger opportunities and are critical for the survival, economic growth, and success of a company. Innovating helps develop original concepts and innovation is a driver of optimizing operations. Companies that innovate are able to set the organization in a different paradigm in order to identify new opportunities and best methods to solve current problems.

Moreover,

    Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. in the standard ISO 56000 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

Innovation often takes place through the development of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art works or business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society. Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention:innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (i.e. new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in a market or society, and not all innovations require a new invention.

Technical innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation.

Four types innovation model:-

Radical innovation: "establishes a new dominant design and, hence, a new set of core design concepts embodied in components that are linked together in a new architecture." (p. 11)[21]

Incremental innovation: "refines and extends an established design. Improvement occurs in individual components, but the underlying core design concepts, and the links between them, remain the same." (p. 11)[21]

Architectural innovation: "innovation that changes only the relationships between them [the core design concepts]" (p. 12)[21]

Modular Innovation: "innovation that changes only the core design concepts of a technology"

Process of innovation:-

An early model included only three phases of innovation. According to Utterback (1971), these phases were: 

1) idea generation, 

2) problem solving, and

 3) implementation.

 By the time one completed phase 2, one had an invention, but until one got it to the point of having an economic impact, one didn't have an innovation. Diffusion wasn't considered a phase of innovation. Focus at this point in time was on manufacturing.

All organizations can innovate, including for example hospitals, universities, and local governments.The organization requires a proper structure in order to retain competitive advantage. Organizations can also improve profits and performance by providing work groups opportunities and resources to innovate, in addition to employee's core job tasks.Executives and managers have been advised to break away from traditional ways of thinking and use change to their advantage. The world of work is changing with the increased use of technology and companies are becoming increasingly competitive. Companies will have to downsize or reengineer their operations to remain competitive. This will affect employment as businesses will be forced to reduce the number of people employed while accomplishing the same amount of work if not more.

For instance, former Mayor Martin  O'Malley pushed the city of baltimore to use citistat  a performance measurement data and management system that allows city officials to maintain statistics on several areas from crime trends to the conditions of potholes .This system aided in better evaluation of policies and procedures with accountability and efficiency in terms of time and money. In its first year, CitiStat saved the city $13.2 million.Even mass transit  systems have innovated with hybrid bus fleets to real time tracking at bus stands. In addition, the growing use of mobile data terminals in vehicles, that serve as communication hubs between vehicles and a control center, automatically send data on location, passenger counts, engine performance, mileage and other information. This tool helps to deliver and manage transportation systems.

Still other innovative strategies include  hospitals digitizing medical information in electronic mechanical records. For example, the U S department and housing evelopment's HOPE VI initiatives  severely distressed public housing in urban areas into revitalized, mixed-income environments; the Harlem Children’s Zone used a community-based approach to educate local area children; and the Environmental Protection Agency's brownfield grants facilitates turning over brownfields for environmental protection, green spaces, community and commercial development.

Goals and failures 

Programs of organizational innovation are typically tightly linked to organizational goals and growth objectives, to the business plan, and to market competitive positioning. Davila et al. (2006) note, "Companies cannot grow through cost reduction and reengineering alone... Innovation is the key element in providing aggressive top-line growth, and for increasing bottom-line results".^[59]

One survey across a large number of manufacturing and services organizations found that systematic programs of organizational innovation are most frequently driven by: improved quality, creation of new markets, extension of the product range, reduced labor costs, improved production processes, reduced materials cost, reduced environmental damage, replacement of products/services, reduced energy consumption, and conformance to regulations.^[59]

Different goals are appropriate for different products, processes, and services. According to Andrea Vaona and Mario Pianta, some example goals of innovation could stem from two different types of technological strategies: technological competitiveness and active price competitiveness. Technological competitiveness may have a tendency to be pursued by smaller firms and can be characterized as "efforts for market-oriented innovation, such as a strategy of market expansion and patenting activity."^[60] On the other hand, active price competitiveness is geared toward process innovations that lead to efficiency and flexibility, which tend to be pursued by large, established firms as they seek to expand their market foothold.^[60] Whether innovation goals are successfully achieved or otherwise depends greatly on the environment prevailing in the organization.^[61]

Failure of organizational innovation programs has been widely researched and the causes vary considerably. Some causes are external to the organization and outside its influence of control. Others are internal and ultimately within the control of the organization. Internal causes of failure can be divided into causes associated with the cultural infrastructure and causes associated with the innovation process itself. David O'Sullivan wrote that causes of failure within the innovation process in most organizations can be distilled into five types: poor goal definition, poor alignment of actions to goals, poor participation in teams, poor monitoring of results, and poor communication and access to information.^[62]

Conclusion:-

Open innovation is nothing new. Innovations have always openly been achieved despite boundaries and across organisations. It is a fact that ideas always evolve from exchange – the reason why Steven Johnson, author of the book “Where good Ideas come from”, sees coffee houses as true idea labs.

“This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.” Steven Johnson

The reason why open innovation is popular nowadays is because it empowers us to access new ideas and the social networks build around them, which was not possible before. Innovation hubs act as network nodes with open doors and work in the same way as innovation challenges. People from different disciplines and with different passions come together around a shared purpose. This is the best recipe to bring ideas to fruition. We are constantly witnessing the creation of idea networks, which allows to exchange success stories but also lessons learnt from failures. British author Charles Leadbeater in this context refers to systemic innovation and predicts that “systems innovation will become the most important focus for companies and governments, cities and entire societies.” In the last decade there has been a growing focus on product and services innovation as a source of competitive advantage.