Innovation Management- An Introduction
Meinrad Calleja, 2005
Innovation has been described as ‘the generation and application of
new ideas and skills’. Innovation usually concerns product/ process. However,
innovation ‘management’, as
distinguished from ‘evolution’, is concerned with identifying innovation
opportunities and facilitating their implementation. In short, innovation
management does not only encourage ‘innovation’ as in technical development,
but actually manages its parameters beyond mere ‘production’. Innovation
management actually gauges impact assessment and sustainability of innovation,
managing both the demand and supply variables over long-term time-frames, while
also exploring ancillary consumption opportunities within a wider context.
Post-Taylor / Post-Fordist scientific management was concerned with
de-layering the vertical management hierarchies, deskilling, technological
innovation, and democratizing institutional practices to facilitate the
channeling of ‘innovation’ recommendations that may have been overlooked
because of sterile bureaucratic practices that stifled active constructive
participation. This type of management encouraged ‘innovation’ through business
models that explored what was wrong, why it was not working, and what could be
done to improve the production process and wok environment. Some major
cost-cutting recommendations were highlighted as the apotheosis of this seemingly
hybrid management culture. Major corporations restructured their organizations’
management policies to reflect this novel ethos. Such management was not always
clear on whether it was merely enhancing its corporate image cosmetically or
restructuring its business practices. On both counts, management was not always
coherent on identifying whether change was cyclical or structural. Often,
innovation was encouraged but not ‘managed’.
Innovation seeks to improve the efficiency of products and
processes. Innovation management seeks to understand the dynamics of these
relationships and (through ‘foresight’) to preempt possible demands and provide
for delivering supply through innovation, while actually controlling this
innovation. This is crucially different to simply purging the environmental and
climatic conditions conducive to innovation. Sometimes innovation management
need not alter the product or process at all, but only the external
environment.
Innovation management may also break down innovation deliveries to
be spread out over incremental provisions. This ensures market orientation for
deliverables, cost spreading, induced demand, branding acclimatization, and
value creation. An example of such innovation management is found in consumer
products that involve notable R&D and marketing costs, as well as an
envisaged long-term ‘brand-loyalty’. For example, when Gillette invested
heavily in the innovation of a razor blade, they broke down the ‘innovation’
into incremental provisions that were delivered to consumes in piecemeal
trounces according to various pre-determined economic factors related to (a/
pro- gnostic) market research analysis. Where products are relatively
accessible this is quite common. Technological products, like for example,
mobile phones or DVD’s are also availed gradually. This is a typical innovation
management model. It factors-in not only the innovation of the product, but the
entire supply-demand dynamics management chain. To understand innovation
management the entire dynamics of this chain has to be appreciated.
In this scenario, innovation may be described as ‘a process through
which economic or social value is extracted from knowledge through the
creation, diffusion, and transformation of ideas to produce new of
significantly improved products and processes’.
Innovation management is concerned with holistically identifying the
‘value-development and transformation’ through the employment of analytical skills
and de/ in- ductive processes managed from competence centers that make use of
competitive intelligence data gathering/ mining, creatively diversified R &
D targeting metrics, foresight hind/ fore-casting processes that take
cognizance of holistic contexts and trends, and flexible stakeholder resource
sharing. Innovation management ought to be capable of ‘networking’ otherwise
dispersed or scattered sources of intellectual capital and developing and
transforming this into value. Cultural, infrastructural, and strategic
corporate policy organization has to be aligned to a transformative development
synthesis that is capable of stimulating creativity and facilitating or
enabling this to be transformed into ‘exchange’ / ‘use’ potential, rather than
isolated transaction-centric value. Rather than focusing on isolated variables
within production and end-user processes, innovation management ought to look
beyond the concrete economic to the intangible socio-cultural and technological
realms of consumption ‘potential’ to ‘spot and shape’ demand and supply.
Innovation incubation business models often tend to evolve into
template-management manuals bound by sterile protocols that are based
exclusively on the adherence to rationality criteria. These models are based on
dominant paradigms that tend towards fossilization. Paradigm shifts (in Khun’s
sense) occur only when a dominant model is superceded by revolutionary
innovation.
Innovation management is concerned with accentuating the ephemeral or
transitory nature of these production / processes and seeking their
modification by abstracting initially untested yet apparently viable non-core-competence
conduit [demand] possibilities that could be potentially shaped and nurtured. A
business model that exemplifies this innovation management, for example, would
be the evolution of recent mobile telephony use and the extension of what was
previously merely a communication process to now incorporate extensive
non-communication services previously un-thought of. Such a transformation
would not have been possible if management adhered to strictly rational models
based on ‘tested’ core competence business manuals and bureaucratic templates.
Such rigid models exist not only in the exclusively corporate organization but
in a wider cluster of institutions that the corporation depends upon (for
example, financial and academic institutions). It is crucial to break with
these models and the practices they induce. Often, to put it semantically,
these models rely on tiresomely over-familiar clichés. Thus innovation
management ought to be implemented outside and beyond, and independently of,
the production processes.
Innovation management requires a reconfiguration of intellectual
capital and a new language. Such a language needs to be morphologically and
lexically re-coded to create a new form of syntax. This is what creativity is
all about. Innovation management is only the medium of this communication. Lateral
and creative thinking is a crucial tool for innovation management.
Meinrad Calleja
Sources
The International Journal for Innovation Research,
Commercialization, Policy Analysis and Best Practice
Blog :manag/innovations.online journal
MEC
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