Hey there. Welcome back to our innovation management course. Before we begin tackling the concepts and tools, we need to situate this course and understand its context. The name of this course hides one assumption that I want to discuss with you before we begin. This course is titled Innovation Management. Today the idea that innovations can be managed is not surprising. Organizations manage innovation all the time. Apple, for example, launches a new life phone more than one actually every year, companies like Ford the phi hat and General Motors also launch yearly the updated versions of their vehicles every year. However, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the 20th century, the idea that people or organizations can manage innovation actually seemed odd. In order to understand how innovation became a common practice for companies, we first need to understand the difference between inventions and innovation. There have always been inventions from written language to farming tools, from clothing to fish impose all cultures have invented objects, services, and processes that made life easier. Invasions, however, are not innovations. We define innovation as a creation of a novel, improved product or service. This is a very broad definition and it is purposefully so. The keyword here is product. Innovations by definition, something that can be sold in the market. Some invasions do go on to become innovations, but most do not. While invasion seem to emerge all around us from the minds them work of individuals, innovations are different. They are the product of a conscious effort made by a group of individuals to create a product or service that can be commercialized, sold in the marketplace. In this course, we will focus on understanding the process, the management of innovation. Simply put, we are going to look at how ideas can become products or services, how organizations actually do it in real life. Those matters for a series of reasons. First, even if you do not work in an R&D department of the company, you'll be pressured to be more innovative. This request as often as nice sounding as it is meaningless. In this course, we will see what to being innovative actually means and how we can use a managerial view to understand how to innovate in our own work. Second, organizations are born, grow, and die because of innovations. Blockbuster was killed by the innovation, video streaming. The Black Barrier was killed by the innovation, the iPhone and the list goes on. If we understand innovation management, it can prepare us professionals for the inevitable shifts that follow major innovations. There is a third aspect. There are benefits to understanding our company and the competitor's innovation strategy. Where's the market going, what type of technology are we investing in? What is the new product or service that could transform this industry? In order to answer these questions, we must first understand how organizations actually manage innovation in their day-to-day operations. But how is innovation managed? How do managers like me, are you approach innovative projects? What are the tools that are used to do so? This is exactly what we're going to be seeing during this course. Organizations managing innovations of all kinds for the very incremental improvements in products, such as when Heinz, the continent company, launches a new lead for their correct bottle to the very radical ones like on SpaceX, accompanying the aerospace sector, developed a reusable rocket that can land on a platform after being used to launch Capstone Router space. Both then you Heinz ketchup bottle and the novel version of the SpaceX rockets are by definition innovations. However, they are very different in nature. We define innovations as the creation of novel, improved products or services. This definition includes the very incremental and the very radical innovations. The new products that have only a slight change of features when compared to the previous version and the radical world change in projects that marvelous, such as the space rockets and capsules developed by SpaceX or the incredible life-saving vaccines developed by BioNTech and Pfizer. This distinction is crucial and is the most important takeaway for all of this course. Not all innovations are alike and they require different approaches should be managed properly. If you do not remember anything at all from this video. But just that there are different types of innovation and that they require different approaches, that's good enough for me. In the next lesson, we'll take a deep dive to understand innovation as a functioning organizations. Let's get to it.
