Innovation as a Core Competency
Introduction
Some important aspects of innovation include
"...1. Ensure a company-wide awareness of the need to change to the point where managers know that it involves stepping outside that pre-existing comfort zones.
2. Encourage innovative ways of thinking - to not only assess what is and is not working, but to continually promote improvement. 'How can we do this better, faster, less expensively?' 'What entirely new things could we be doing to delight our customers and you will growing existing markets?'
3. Implement processes and tools to support new ways of thinking, company-wide awareness of the need to change, and to reinforce the change process.
4. Adopt attitudes and mechanisms to minimise risk, but most importantly embrace - and be willing to tolerate and pay for - failures that the firm will experience..."
James Forcier, 2010
Furthermore,
- staff selection focus needs to be on the ability to function effectively in a given position. Yet
"...firms perform cursory candidate assessments, emphasise resumes versus capabilities, increasingly rely on Internet searches and automated tools to identify, sort and track candidates......inordinate attention is paid to educational qualifications......at the expense of the competencies that are essential for achieving strategic objectives..."
James Forcier, 2010
- cross functional teams are important in innovation
"...participant mixtures have influenced not only at the margins of decision-making, but can - and frequently do - alter the slate of decision alternatives, how the alternatives are analysed, and the manner in which choices are implemented..."
James Forcier, 2010
Cross-functional integration have a greater chance of
i) of ensuring that new products reflect customers' needs
ii) being designed for ease of manufacturing
ii) minimising development costs and time-to-market
iii) innovation-related decisions being aligned with the organisation's business model and strategic objectives
- development funnel
Develop a process for identifying and selecting the most promising ideas. One way to do this is via a development funnel that
"...isolates and routinizes the major components of the assessment process, and ensures that ideas are not subject to personal or departmental bias that might obstruct an objective evaluation of them..."
James Forcier, 2010
- open innovation
Collaborate with outside people and organisations like universities, customers, suppliers, inventors, etc who can contribute to the development of the products and/or services and/or processes.
- intellectual capital
An increasingly important input is intellectual capital.
"...Intellectual capital is a key competitive differentiator for businesses which must deploy innovation as the pre-dominant driver of superior profitability..."
James Forcier, 2010