give me a paragraph on innovation
Answers
Innovation is an important concept to understand as a manager and for an organisation as a whole. Used in the correct manner, innovation can give an organisation the competitive advantage they need to be a success in their market. Firstly, it is useful to look at innovation in general. Naylor (1999, p 212) says 'innovations are ideas that are developed into new products or processes. They result in changes that customers recognise as new.' Dess et al (2007, p 96) describes innovation as 'using new innovation to transform organisational processes or create commercially viable products and services.' Put in even simpler terms, innovation is 'the process of making improvements by introducing something new'. Therefore, the two words that sum innovation up are 'process' and 'new'. Innovation is a process and there theories and models that I will evaluate in this essay. Innovation also has to be something new that an organisation can use as an advantage.
Modern economies are often referred to as innovation economies. Humans engaged in business world are continuously in the pursuit of wealth through innovation. It is an open truth that a company's success does not come from its chandeliers, gardens, ambience, acres of lands rather it comes from its intellectual and systems capabilities. Innovation and information are the crucial assets of a business and there is a need to learn to handle these assets in new ways. Traditional monitoring systems which were designed to deal with tangible inputs & outputs are no longer adequate to survive in the market. Organizations are required to share information & innovation internally & learn to adapt more quickly to external circumstances in order to retain their competitive advantage. In response to this situation, the first phase of KM was focused on information technology & systems. Technical tools were used to collect the existing innovation in order to make the organization run more smoothly. In the second phase of KM, it focuses more on the creation of new innovation- Creativity & Innovation in order to keep the organization one step ahead of its competitors. (Mullins, 2005, p114)
In other words we can say that simply recycling old innovation will not serve the purpose of survival but creation & application of new innovation is required to achieve the lofty peak of competition and success. However it is important to keep in mind that the created new innovation should be useful for the organization.
INNOVATION AND INFORMATION
To define the term innovation it is first required to differentiate between data, information, innovation and wisdom. Although innovation is often seen as a richer form of information but this differentiation is not helpful. What we can say here, as Neil Flemming (1996) has also given;
A collection of data is not information.
A collection of information is not innovation.
A collection of innovation is not wisdom.
A collection of wisdom is not truth.
The idea is that information, innovation & wisdom are more than simply collection. Rather, the whole represents more than the sum of its parts & has a synergy of its own.
The collection of data where is no relation between the factors of data is not information. The pieces of data may represent information, yet whether or not it is information depends on the understanding of the one perceiving the data. Information is quite simply an understanding of the relationship between pieces of data, or between pieces of data and other information. Beyond relation there is pattern, where pattern is more than simply a relation of relations. Pattern embodies both a consistency and completeness of relations which, to an extent, creates its own context. Pattern also serves as an Archetype with both an implied repeatability and predictability.