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How can innovation be framed as a process?

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Crafting Strategies for Innovation Initiatives for Corporate Entrepreneurs

University of Maryland, College Park

4.2 (17 ratings) | 1.7K Students Enrolled

Course 3 of 5 in the Corporate Entrepreneurship: Innovating within Corporations Specialization

This course focuses on enhancing your understanding of (1) how an internal venture is organized and (2) how to overcome resistance to your new venture ideas within the company. The course is specifically valuable for: • Employees who have creative ideas important to their company; • Managers seeking to assemble creative people and resources; • Technical specialists desiring to become part of an internal venture; and • Consultants who advise companies on ways to launch and grow internal ventures. You will learn strategies to help you launch a corporate venture with coursework focused on four key areas: • Examining how to audit a company's internal environment to establish a framework for its innovation capabilities; • Creating a plan for an organizational structure and operational format that incorporates key roles and players for internal ventures within the company; • Analyzing corporate culture to identify creative capabilities that leverage the company's best practices for innovation; • Evaluating innovation portfolios and compose innovation strategies that are best aligned with the implementation potential within the company. Try this course for FREE at https://www.coursera.org/learn/corporate-entrepreneurs-innovation-strategy

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From the lesson

Organizational Structures and Operational Formats

In this module, we will create a plan for an organizational structure and operational format that incorporates key roles and players for internal ventures within the company.

Welcome to week two2:37

How do you evaluate a winning innovation idea when you see one?12:25

Who are innovation's creative role players?8:16

Who are innovation's implementation role players?10:29

How do manager, entrepreneur, and innovator roles differ?12:43

How can innovation be framed as a process?7:24

Do different organizational forms matter for innovation initiatives?6:59

What organizational forms do innovation venture units take?12:32

Taught By

Dr. Thomas J. Mierzwa
Lecturer of Technology Entrepreneurship

Transcript

Today, we're going to look at how innovation can be framed as a process.

And a process is a very interesting lens for understanding how an innovation works.

And so, the way in which we're going to look at innovation is to try and

look at it through a process lens.

And so, a process,

you can start by thinking of a process is a series of steps.

Is very structural and people play roles in each of those steps of the process.

And we know that processes can be systematically modeled and

we know that a process produces results and effects.

There's an input and there's an output.

And so, because innovation is been studied by many disciplines.

And viewed in many different ways of seeing a process.

We're going to try and

standardize a way in which we can look at innovation as a process.

So we're going to start by looking at four different ways

that innovation actually happen, four different innovation processes.

And so, we're going to look at Innovation as New Product Development.

Innovation is New Technology.

Innovation as a Management Improvement.

And Innovation as a Service Improvement.

And we believe that by looking at these four different ways that innovation

happens as a process we can put together a template or a set of common steps

that you can use as a lens to understand how innovation works as a process.

So let's start by looking at a new product development path.

There's a whole series of steps here from strategic

planning to allocation of resources to generating a product concept.

All these things are in a standard sequence for

a new product development path.

You test the feasibility, you refine the product, you get it ready for manufacture,

you manufacture it and get it out into the marketplace.

And then, you position it for sale to your customers.

And then, finally, the last step in the process is really the support, the product

because it often it has problems and your problem solving and your improving it.

And so, there's always that service aspect of it.

So consider examples of some new product.

A consumer product that you might be familiar with.

It has come into the market place in the last year.

And then, imagine the path

that those products took to get into the market place.

Ask yourself how might something like materials or

manufacture affect that innovation process.

And all of the different steps, things like materials or

manufacturing steps might have made a difference in that process.

Another way to look at innovation process is through a new technology path.

It triggers and

starts with the recognition of a breakthrough technology of some sort or

sometimes a recognized user need that brings about a breakthrough in technology.

And so, once that happens, you formulate an application idea,

you resolve any technology problems with that application,

you translate the idea into some kind of a solution, you develop and

refine the solution, and you see that adopted in the marketplace by users.

And so, when you think about new technology and process,

consider examples of new technologies that have recently come into the marketplace,

things like nanotechnology, even maybe something that has been around for

a while, flash technology, and hard drives.

All these things have come into the marketplace

through technology breakthroughs.

And so, ask yourself,

how do these technology breakthroughs serve to enable those new innovations?

And where did the technology originate?

Did it originate in a lab?

Was it in somebody's garage?

And how have these breakthroughs actually shaped the innovation process

as a series of steps?

So another innovation that we're going to look at for process is a management path.

In the management practice improvements, people recognize

opportunities within the organization for improving a management process.

They generate an idea or they address a need, and they test the idea for

feasibility inside the organisation, and they refine it for

acceptability by the people who are responsible for carrying it out,

and then they convince employees as users.

In this case, management practice innovation typically are carried

out inside of organizations to make something work better and

to make the organization run smoother.

And so, you have to convince employees to accept it.

And so, ultimately by getting employee acceptance and

backing, you get the innovation adopted.

So thinking about that, consider examples of some management practice innovations

you might have experienced as an employee, or a manager, or even as an observer

of organizations you do business with or you are a customer for.

And ask yourself,

what internal forces triggered the need to make that management improvement?

What was it that was going on?

What problem surfaced?

That that organization decided to carry off a management innovation.

And then, ask yourself, how did employees

influence the firm' intention to make that management innovation?

Or was it customers who influenced that?

Another innovation path is the service innovation.

And here, there is a discovery of some operational problem or

inefficiency that reaches the marketplace and has an effect on customers.

And so, often, there is some way to explore what the nature of the problem is,

generate some alternative solutions, and test for customer acceptance because this,

in the case of service, you're servicing customers.

And so, you're outside of your organization, you're in the marketplace,

and so by testing for customer acceptance you seek a buy in from,

not only your customers, but the employees who have to deliver that service and

finally you implement the service innovation.

And so, some questions to think about here, consider examples of service

innovations you have experienced as a customer, from the customer perspective.

So you would have experienced service innovation in the banking industry and

the airline industry,

all kinds of different industries where you are receiving a service.

And so, ask yourself, what force triggered the need to make that service improvement?

How would users or customers have influenced the firm's innovation process?

So some take aways here about innovation process, and

framing innovation, Is that the most important processes that

there are out there we can frame as a pattern of steps.

Now, we're going to be talking about those in some detail, but

by analyzing the sequence and pattern of known innovations,

you can begin to construct a process template for managing a new innovation.

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