What is Innovation

1
What is Innovation?

• Innovation is composed of two parts
• The generation of an idea or invention
• The conversion of that invention into a business
  or other useful application
• Innovation Invention Exploitation.
• The invention process covers all efforts
  aimed at creating new ideas and getting them to
  work. The exploitation process includes all
  stages of commercial development, application and
  transfer, including the focusing of ideas or
  inventions toward specific objectives, evaluating
  those objectives, downstream transfer of research
  and/or development results, and the eventual
  broad-based utilization, dissemination and
  diffusion of the technology-based outcomes.
• The overall management of technological
  innovation thus includes the organisation and
  direction of human and capital resources toward
  effectively (1) creating new knowledge (2)
  generating technical ideas aimed at new and
  enhanced products, manufacturing processes and
  services (3) developing those ideas into working
  prototypes (4) transferring them into
  manufacturing, distribution or other use.

2
Why to Innovate?

• In order to remain competitive, companies look
  towards innovation. A constant injection of new
  ideas keeps a company progressive and gives them
  an edge in the marketplace, especially in todays
  global marketplace.

3
Different Forms of Innovation

• Technologically innovative outcomes come in many
  forms
• Incremental or radical in degree
• Modifications of existing entities or entirely
  new entities
• Embodied in products, processes or services
• Oriented toward consumer, industrial or
  governmental use
• Based on various single or multiple technologies

4
Invention vs. Innovation

• Invention is marked by discovery or a state of
  new existence, usually at the lab or bench,
  whereas innovation is marked by first use, in
  manufacturing or in a market.

5
How Idea is Generated ?

• Ideas can be drawn from the "market pull" of
  sensing real or potential customer needs or
  demands, or from the "technological push" of
  imagining the possible extension of technological
  performance of a material, component or system.
• Managerial research has repeatedly demonstrated
  that 60 to 80 percent of successful technical
  innovations seem to have been initiated by
  "market pull," i.e. forces reflecting orientation
  to perceived need or demand.
• But, despite the presumed dominant role of
  "market pull" as a source of innovative projects,
  "technology push," i.e. undertaking projects for
  advancing the technical state-of-the-art in an
  area without anticipation of the specific
  commercial benefits to be derived, is also the
  critical source of many significant product and
  process successes.
• Idea creativity arises from managerial
  influences, for example from the internal
  organisational climate or environment and
  especially from supervisory practices.

6
Radical Innovation vs. Incremental Technology or
Process Advancement

• Most organized scientific and engineering
  activity, certainly within the corporation, is
  beyond the idea generating stage and produces not
  radical breakthroughs but rather a broad base of
  incremental technological advance, sometimes
  leading cumulatively over time to major technical
  change.
• Innovation can start after deciding technical or
  market goals, it rarely begins with independent
  invention in large and medium structured business
  entities. Small or a start up business can have
  more liberty of independent invention first
  before exploring market goals

7
Small vs. Large Organisations

• Smaller organisations usually encourage
  innovation during the earliest emerging stage of
  a technology, whereas large organisations mostly
  opt it at transitional and more mature stages of
  a technology.

8
Individual vs. Team

• Individual research which was popular earlier can
  not always be valid in the present business
  world. Now a days, organisations inter
  department partnership and collaboration turns
  research into multi-stage, multi-person, complex
  process.
• When technical advancement is the goal, managers
  have long understood that professional depth in
  an organisation is achieved by teaming people
  together in their own area of specialization,
  with work assigned and performance supervised by
  a more accomplished person of the same
  specialization.
• On the contrary it is also true that many of the
  new inventions and advancements are done by
  individuals. These innovations are adopted and
  improvised by medium and large organisations for
  commercial application.

9
Discipline vs. Innovation

• Innovation requires space and liberty. It cannot
  be done under stringent structured specified and
  calculated environment. Moreover, when it is done
  in distributed architecture effective medium of
  co-ordination is required to let all the groups
  and individual work in synergy. Thus, innovation
  can be supported by management consisting of
  loose monitoring and strong co-ordination.
  Moreover, management should have less invasive
  control mechanism to have effective control over
  duplication (reinventing the wheel) and
  irrelevant vague ideas consuming companys
  resources. Management should identify bottlenecks
  and alternative idea formulations can be
  initiated separately.

10
Staffing Considerations for Innovation

• Profiles required in collective effort of
  Innovation
• 1. Idea Generators
• Thus idea generators for technical projects
  may be scientists or engineers, sometimes
• sales or marketing persons, or even
  managers.
• 2. Idea-exploiters
• Mostly managers, sales and marketing
  persons
• 3. Business innovator
• They supply the support functions of
  planning, scheduling, monitoring and control,
• technical work supervision, business and
  financial coordination relating to the RD
• project
• 4. Gatekeepers or special communicators
• They bring information messages from
  sources outside of a project group
• into that group.
• 5. Sponsor or coach
• The role is one of providing
  encouragement, psychic support, facilitation to
• the more junior people involved in the
  task implementation.