Innovation And The Modern Day Business Environment

There are various internal and external factors that can influence the development of innovations positively or negatively. External factors may include firm size, market structure, degree of industry concentration, and macroeconomic factors. Size of the firm tend to be more positive related to innovation in manufacturing and profit-making organizations as compared to non-profit making organization, and relationship that involves size and innovation will become stronger if a non-personnel or a long transformation measure of size has been applied, as compared to application of a personnel or a raw measure of size. Depending on the competition within the market for example a positive competition with favorable atmosphere, the firm will be successful in its kind of innovation. The way industries have been structured and how they change over time may have effect to the innovation among organizations. Their standards, the institutional setting and the process of liberalization and privatization also affect innovation.

Alongside the entrepreneur spirit, Innovation is the process of taking new ideas and implementing them into the market. Key word being “new”, an innovation can be sometimes viewed as the application to better solutions that meet new demand-requirements, inarticulated needs or existing market needs. Innovative ideas range from: goods, services, products, processes, services, technologies or ideas that create value for which customers will pay for. For an idea to be an innovation, it must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. This means is that one must be ready and willing put their new idea to the test. On the other hand, there is recognition that “innovation is also critical to cultural, environmental, social, and artistic progress as well” (Bullinger, 2006). With this stated, high-tech innovation is ultimately the reason why we can be thankful for the many new conveniences of the 21st century. Although we might see the forefront of innovation being very prominent in today’s world, innovation is truly nothing new. From the start of modern man times, innovative ideas have paved the way for civilization to advance and develop into what we are today and at the same time, we have barely begin to chip away at the tip of the iceberg of our true human potential. Some scholars believe that innovation is a

Innovation is the process by which organizations use their resources and competencies to develop new or improved goods and services or to develop new production and operating systems so that they can better respond to the needs of their customers. Innovation can result in brilliant success for an organization. Apple’s ipod has changed not only the music listening industry but also music purchasing and now they are moving into the mobile phone industry.

This research intends to explore innovation at an individual level, but in a context, where the roles and functions of an organization appear eminent either as a promoter or an inhibitor of innovation.

Invention is the result of a long study, research, and experimentation (Innovation, n.d.); Innovation is “the discovery and the execution of pioneering ideas that create value” (Greco, 2011), in other words, new application of known concepts. A practical example of invention is the alkaline battery that provided a light-weight, small, and portable power source; innovation applied this concept to anything possible from communication devises, mecanich and construction tools, and even toys. Technical workstream leaders understand that innovators are today’s competitors reducing times, and maximazing profits with new techniques; but inventors have the potential to reshape the landscape of today’s markets leaving dominant companies out of bussiness. Who remembers door-to-door salesmen or “dear John”

Closed innovation implies that companies try to develop new products and processes based on the idea that the company itself has the best possible knowledge and resources for innovation. (CHRESBROUGH, 2003 p228)

My personal philosophy of innovation encompasses many ideas. It is not only thinking outside of the box, but questioning why the box is even necessary. It is about creating opportunity out of disappointment, being open to different, and unafraid of being vulnerable. It is about breathing, living, and embodying the change that you want to see in the world and exploring new paths in achieving that change. Innovation is being courageously defiant in the face of the universe shouting “You can’t” and replying with a resounding “Watch me”.

Innovation within my organisation is about creating and successfully applying new ideas in this particular field. This could be in the form of such as creating and bringing a new product or service to market, or a series of smaller

Innovation is not a single activity; it is a process. For businesses, innovation means fresh ideas, developing new products or services and its effective processes. Innovation can be key to any business or company in the future. Bringing innovation into your business can help you save time and money and gives you the competitive advantage needed to grow your business.

During the past nine weeks, you were exposed to a variety of perspectives on innovation via case studies and a collection of readings. You analyzed company after company and situation after situation that

Innovation is normally used to denote the process that takes place when a product or a process is developed, from idea to market; the concept of invention only denotes the process that takes place when new ideas or solutions are generated. Baumol (2002) argues “is it possible to have lots of inventions and still lack innovations. Nevertheless, inventions are a necessary precondition for innovation”.

Innovation refers to finding new ways to improve the existing products, services, processes, technologies, and employee performance in an organizational setup. In today's competitive business environment, organizations have to focus on bringing innovation in each and every aspect of their business operations; like products or service offerings, enterprise resource planning systems, marketing and promotional efforts, and organizational structure. The market challenges and competitive pressures also force organizations to use a blend of all these innovation processes in their business activities. Therefore, it is vital to give an equal focus on product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, and organizational innovation within the limited organizational resources and capabilities.

Innovation offers the companies a competitive advantage. Presently and within the future, more than any time in history, the key to competitive advantage is innovation. However innovation will facilitate businesses meet all of their strategic challenges, not simply competition; to illustrate, in confronting accelerating rates of change, globalization, apace advancing technology, a additional numerous workforce, associated a modification from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. Meeting all of those challenges helps the firm attain competitiveness, and meeting these challenges suitably depends on innovation. Innovation allows a firm to workout its challenges in distinctive ways in which build competitive advantage either through relative differentiation, a relative low-priced position, or few acceptable level of each. Innovation cannot assure success, however success cannot be achieved within the end of the day without it.

It can be said that there are many descriptions of the innovation process. Rothwell & Zegveld (1985) view innovation as a process of interaction between the firm and its environment. “The overall pattern of the innovation process can be thought of as a complex net of communication paths, both intra-organisational and extraorganisational, linking together the various in-house functions and linking the firm to the broader scientific and technological community and to the marketplace (p. 50)”. This indicates the importance of communication between the internal functions of a company and the knowledge of external parties.

Historically, most managers equated innovation primarily with the development of new technologies or products. However, innovation is increasingly seen as the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans, distribution channels, or management practices. There is a greater recognition that great ideas can transform any part of the value chain and those products and services represent just a small segment of innovation. This broadening of focus has implications for those who are responsible to innovate. It used to be just a selected group of employees, usually within R&D: designers, engineers or scientists, whose job was to generate and pursue new ideas. Nowadays, organizations are trying to induce an innovative culture across the hierarchy to achieve holistic transformations. Making innovation everyone’s business sounds intuitively appealing but is hard to implement. Employees face capacity issues, time constraints, and motivation issues that restrain them. There is often a lack of consistent follow-through of well-intentioned schemes. Additionally, there is typically some level of disconnection between the priorities of senior management and the efforts of those lower down in the organization. This becomes more evident in large corporations where established processes are already in place and leave very little room to innovate.