Innovation – Building And Sustaining Essay, Research Paper

Building and Sustaining Innovation

Innovation is a better thing to do, or a batter way to do it, that increases an organizations ability to achieve its goals. This does not mean change for change?s sake. Innovation has also been defined as Creativity + Change. To qualify as an innovation, a change must be visible to others and must offer a lasting impact. Innovation can occur and should be encouraged at all levels within a company from top level executives to lower level managers and individual contributors. Thus an innovation may be a product, a process, a method or a system, but it is more than an idea. It has to be converted from idea into action.

In the continuously and rapidly changing world of business, innovation is a key to success. If we can learn more about what stimulates and drives it, and how to manage it, we should be able to deliver more and better innovation.

Sustaining Innovation requires approaches that have structural impact–deliberately creating an environment in which Innovation is integrated into every process and developed within every individual.

There are two levels at which innovation needs to be managed, the organizational level and the operational level. At the organizational level, we need to ensure that there is a culture that passionately embraces innovation; there exist strategic alignment of innovation initiatives with business goals, policies and processes; and that there is an organization wide focus on the customer and markets.

At the operational level of managing innovation, there should be risk acceptance and an understanding that inevitable mistakes and even failures are often the basis for future success; an emphasis on, and tangible support for, exploratory thinking; solid interpersonal relationships and internal teamwork, with a climate of mutual commitment and support; and finally a cross-functional, cross-discipline communication, collaboration and teaming?within the organization and with external partners.

In our paper we would like to lay down the path to incorporate innovation into the strategy development, as well as day to day operations in a growing organization.

Noopur Chaturvedi (15086) and Anindo Sengupta (15128)