Innovation & Change Flashcards
What is organisational innovation?
The successful implementation of creative ideas in organisations
What are technology cycles?
Begins with the birth of a new technology and ends when that technology is replaced
What is the S Curve pattern of innovation?
A pattern of technological innovation characterised by slow initial progress, then rapid progress and then slow progress again as a technology matures and reaches its limits
What is an innovation stream?
Patterns of innovation over time that can create sustainable competitive advantage
What are the stages of an innovation stream?
- Technological discontinuity
- Discontinuous change
- Dominant Design
- Technological Lockout
- Incremental change
What is a Technological discontinuity?
- A scientific advance or a unique combination of existing technologies creates a significant breakthrough in performance or function
- MP3 invented
What is discontinuous change?
- The phase of the innovation stream characterised by technological substitution and design competition
- Early MP3 players
What is Technological substitution?
A part of discontinuous change - Customers purchase of new technologies to replace older ones
What is design competition?
A part of discontinuous change including competition between old and new technologies to establish a new technological standard or dominant design
What is a dominant design?
- A phase of the innovation stream where a new technological design or process becomes the accepted market standard
- iPod
How do dominancy designs emerge?
- Critical mass e.g. Blu-ray
- Practical solution e.g. QWERTY
- Standards bodies
What is technological lockout?
A phase of the innovation stream when a new dominant design prevents companies from competitively selling its products or makes it difficult to do so
What is incremental change?
A phase of the innovation stream where companies innovate by lowering costs and improving the functioning and performance of the dominant design
What are creative workplace environment?
Workplace cultures in which workers perceive that new ideas are welcomed, valued and encouraged
What are components of creative workplace environments?
- Challenging work
- Organisational encouragement
- Supervisory encouragement
- Work group encouragement
- Freedom
- Lack of organisational impediments
How does challenging work create a creative workplace environment?
Promotes creativity through creating psychological experience known as Flow - a state of effortlessness.
Requires balance between skills and task challenges, i.e. boredom vs inability
How is innovation managed during discontinuous change?
The Experiential approach to innovation
What is the Experiential approach to innovation?
Assumes a highly uncertain environment and uses intuition, flexible options and hands-on experience to reduce uncertainty and accelerate learning and understanding
What are the aspects of the experiential approach to innovation?
- Design Iterations
- A cycle of repetition in which a company tests a prototype of a new product or service, improves on that design and then builds and tests the improved prototype
- Testing
- The systematic comparison of different product designs to design iterations
- Milestones
- Formal project review points used to assess progress and performance
What are required (further aspects) for the experiential approach to innovation?
- Multifunctional Teams
- Work teams composed of people from different departments
- Powerful Leaders
- Provide the vision, discipline and motivation to keep the
innovation process focused, on time and on target
- Provide the vision, discipline and motivation to keep the
How is innovation managed during incremental change?
The Compression approach to innovation
What is the compression approach to innovation?
Assumes that incremental innovation can be planned using a series of steps and that compressing those steps can speed innovation
What are the aspects of the compression approach to innovation?
- Generational change
- Planning
- Supplier involvement
- Shortening the time of individual steps
- Overlapping steps
- Multifunctional teams
What is organisational decline?
A large decrease in organisational performance that occurs when companies don’t anticipate, recognise, neutralise or adapt to the internal or external pressures that threaten their survival
What are the stages of organisational decline?
- Blindness
- Inaction
- Faulty action
- Crisis
- Dissolution
What are change forces?
Forces that produce differences in the form, quality or condition of an organisation over time
What are resistance forces?
Forces that support the existing state of conditions in organisations
What are the stages of managing resistance to change?
- Unfreezing
- Change intervention
- Refreezing
What is Unfreezing?
The first stage of instigating change, getting the people affected by change to believe that change in needed
What is Change intervention?
The second stage of instigating change, the process used to get workers and managers to change their behaviour and workplace practices
What is Refreezing?
The third stage of instigating change, supporting and reinforcing new changes so that they stick
What are the methods for managing resistance to change?
Education & Communication, participation, negotiation, top management support and coercion
What errors can be made during unfreezing?
- Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency
- Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition
What errors can be made during change intervention?
- Lacking a vision
- Under communicating the vision
- Not removing obstacles to the new vision
- Not systematically planning for a creating short term wins
What errors can be made during refreezing?
- Declaring victory too soon
- Not anchoring changes in corporations culture
What are the 3 change tools/techniques?
- Result driven change
- GE workout
- Organisational development
What is results driven change?
Change created quickly by focusing on the measurement and improvement of results
What is the GE workout?
A three day meeting in which managers and employees from different levels and parts of an organisation quickly generate and act on solutions to specific business problems
What is organisational development?
A collection of planned change interventions designed to improve an organisations long term health and performance - involving a change agent (outsider)
