Focus Questions for "Innovation Within the Organization"

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

Six Sigma is a business instrument for the betterment of a process. It is a controlled approach and methodology for obviating defects in any process such as manufacturing, businesses and any product or service. Six Sigma has been gaining tremendous popularity in industry today. However, academics have conducted limited research on this rising phenomenon. Interpreting Six Sigma primarily requires giving out a conceptual definition and describing an underlying theory. This topic uses Grounded theory approach and meager literature available to suggest an initial definition and theory of Six Sigma. This paper indicates that although tools and techniques on the topic are similar to earlier approaches of quality management, it provides a structure which is more detailed. This emerging structure for quality management attempts to improve the quality of the yield of a process by identifying and obviating the defects and causes lowering variability in business processes. Also one of the important areas touched upon is the conceptual understanding of Six Sigma. Each Six Sigma project executed inside an

To develop knowledge and understanding of innovation and change as required by a practising or potential first line manager

In the the last class you had a quote that said “Innovation is a charge into the unknown”. In the past ten years, technology has reached new levels in every company. There seems to be a sweet spot in the innovation of technology. If you’re the first to push a new idea, some may question the success of the new innovation. If the innovation is successful, other companies my try to build a better model that can be more efficient. But if you missed the small window of opportunity, customers will not move forward in your idea, because there is something on the market that is great already.

An innovation is considered as either an idea, behavior, or object that is perceived as new by the receiving audience, and innovations can offer three valuable insights into the process of social change which include: what qualities make certain innovations spread rapidly than others, the value of peer-peer conversations and peer networks during social changes, and assessing and understanding the needs of different individuals in a specific population (Rogers, 2003, p 35-36). One of the most pressing obstacles for Human Resources departments and organizational management is the ongoing development of employee’s talent that is capable of meeting the business objectives

Tidd et al (2000) states, “the innovation is a business process of revolving opportunity into new ideas and of putting these into widely used practice. In term of the nature, there are five major types of innovations: novelty, competence shifting, complexity, robust design and continuous improvement. While in term of the extent of change, innovations can be divided into incremental, radical and

The concept of Six Sigma was developed in the early 1980’s at Motorola Corporation (Harry and Schroeder, 2000). Six Sigma can be defined as a statistical measure of the performance of a process or product (Kumi et. al., 2006). It is used as a quality control mechanism, which seeks to reduce defects or variations in a process to 3.4 per million opportunities thereby optimizing output and increasing customer satisfaction (Sambhe, 2012). Sigma is representing the standard deviation, a unit of measurement that designates the distribution or spread about the mean of a process (Six Sigma Academy, 2002). In addition, the Six Sigma uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of fact, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing improving, and reinventing business processes (Pande, P., et. al. 2000). The Six Sigma methodology uses statistical tools to identify the factors that matter most for improving the quality of processes and generating bottom-line results. The Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure,

These R&D labs usually concentrated on bringing out new technologies for self-commercialisation. This process can be viewed in the form of a funnel, where a large number of varied ideas and concepts can be trimmed down to few of those concepts and ideas that best meet the requirements of the company. (OECD, 2008) In recent times, companies have become more open with their innovation process, leading to revolution described as “Open Innovation” by Chesbrough (2003). This ‘open innovation’ model is a more dynamic model when compared the traditional model as there is much more interaction between knowledge assets outside the company as well as inside. Henry Chesbrough (2003) in his book “Open Innovation: New Imperative for creating and profiting from technology” defines open innovation as a concept in which companies must use ideas from inside as well as outside sources and find internal and external ways to reach the market in order to advance their technological capabilities. Open innovation combines these 3

Tidd and Bessant (2009) argued that “Unless an organization is able to move into further innovation, it risks being left behind as others take the lead in changing their offerings, their operational processes or the underlying models that drive their business”.

Radical innovation should present a new product, service, practice or solution that significantly differs from previous experience. It usually comes with higher risks as there is no prior knowledge and competences are low (Schilling, 2011:vi). Introducing of a third generation (3G) telephony could be a good illustration of a radical innovation. 3G was launched with an increased bandwidth that could not only transmit a voice, but support more diverse multimedia applications (http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com). To switch from 2G to 3G the telecommunication service required significant investment in development of relevant equipment and infrastructure, such as larger device display, memory and battery capacity, etc. Besides, it was not quite clear how would customers react to this innovation. So, companies and their managers, had to evaluate different risks simultaneously, including technical achievability, reliability, costs, and demand.

As knowledge and innovation become more-critical drivers of business success, the value of intellectual property has never been higher. More than ever, companies now depend on bringing new innovations to market quickly and efficiently. Xerox holds one of the world’s largest portfolios of

Radical innovation should present a new product, service, practice or solution that significantly differs from previous experience. It usually comes with higher risks as there is no prior knowledge and competencies are low (Schilling, 2011:vi). Introducing of a third-generation (3G) telephony could be a good illustration of a radical innovation. 3G was launched with an increased bandwidth that could not only transmit a voice but support more diverse multimedia applications (http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com). To switch from 2G to 3G the telecommunication service required significant investment in the development of relevant equipment and infrastructure, such as larger device display, memory, and battery capacity, etc. Besides, it was not quite clear how would customers react to this innovation. So, companies and their managers had to evaluate different risks simultaneously, including technical achievability, reliability, costs, and demand.

Companies live and breathe innovation; or, at the terribly least, notice it basic to their success. Such companies are those that others ought to emulate for they recognize that to do business, as Peter Drucker prompt in an exceedingly recent Harvard Business review article, “Every firm—not simply businesses—needs one core competence: innovation.”

Looking at the success of Motorola, many companies like Texas Instruments, Allied Signal etc started using Six Sigma methodology to bring organization-wide improvements.

Achieving high rate of performance is the aim of any organization, especially under the pressure of competition. In this regards, innovative abilities of any organization is considered as the leverage of the competitive abilities. The organization 's innovative abilities have drawn the attention of the scholars and practitioners over last decade. Trying to link between innovative abilities and another organizational discipline is one of the most interesting fields to the scholars. Therefore, the current study tries to evaluate the relationship between innovative abilities of organization and Six Sigma as one of the organizational discipline that belongs to the quality umbrella. Six Sigma is considered as a quality approach which has proved its abilities to positively affect the organizational performance. Thus, the current studies aims to review the literature to introduce a conceptual framework that discusses the relationship between the two fields of the organizational discipline represented by Six Sigma and innovation from the perspective of the Absorptive Capacity Theory.