Innovation Concept and Features
“A new concept, creative ideas, and fresh imaginations in form of a technology or technique” are what innovation means in current parlance. Another common definition of innovation is the use of superior solutions to address unmet needs, new requirements, or market demands. Such innovation happens when more efficient versions of existing goods, procedures, services, technology, or business models are made accessible to consumers, governments, and the general public.
An innovation is anything new, better, and more original that “breaks into” the market or society. It is also more effective. Innovation and invention are connected, but they are not the same thing. Innovation is more likely to entail the practical application of an invention (i.e., new or enhanced capacity) to have a significant influence on the market or society. When a technical or scientific issue has to be addressed, innovation typically takes the form of engineering. Enovation is the reverse of innovation.
While it is common to refer to a new gadget as an innovation, in the domains of economics, management science, and other practise and analysis, innovation is often seen as the outcome of a process that combines numerous original ideas in a manner that has an impact on society. To satisfy rising consumer demand, innovations are developed and discovered experimentally in industrial economics.
Additionally, innovation has a more traditional historical definition that is very distinct. Prior to early American colonization, the word “innovation” was derogatory from the 1400s through the 1600s. It served as a pre-modern word for uprising, uprising, and heresy.
Characteristics of Innovation
- Unusual and Useful Plan
A highly innovative organisation is likely to have a distinctive and relevant strategy as its distinguishing trait. Everybody is aware of what Google, Facebook, and Apple do. This is as a result of their unwavering adherence to their plans, which are made explicit. Even while an inventive smaller player may not be well known on a worldwide scale, its executives, staff, business partners, and clients will all be aware of the company’s approach.
A firm won’t be creative if it has a clear, distinct strategy. Being the best is a bland strategy that does not lead to innovation in the same way as being at the forefront of mobile communications technology, creating the safest automobiles possible, or delivering anything anyplace does. If your strategy lacks specificity or fails to set your business apart from the competition, you should remedy the problem as soon as possible!
- Innovation Is a Way to Reach Strategic Objectives
Highly inventive businesses see innovation as a tool for accomplishing strategic objectives rather than as an end in itself. Similar to how a decent camera is a necessary instrument for a photographer to capture professional-quality photographs and how a saw is a necessary tool for a carpenter, innovation is a crucial tool for forward-thinking businesses aiming to achieve their strategic objectives. In fact, the websites of the most innovative businesses in the world tend to focus more on corporate vision than innovation.
- Leaders Are Innovators
Market leadership is the one thing innovation offers more than anything else. Companies that employ innovation to accomplish strategic objectives always dominate their marketplaces. Unfortunately, being the most successful or lucrative does not necessarily follow from this. Since its inception, Amazon has led the way in innovation and established many of the guidelines for online shopping. However, it took the business a while to start turning a profit.
One of the most progressive automakers in the world, Cord introduced ground-breaking technologies including pop-up headlights and front-wheel drive in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the firm failed in 1938 due to its lack of financial success. The financial success of innovators like Apple and Google, on the other hand, is a direct outcome of their creativity. In conclusion, innovators are leaders—but they’re not necessarily successful ones!
- Innovative People Use
Most companies have a large number of imaginative people who have many ideas. Even some of those concepts apply to the requirements of businesses. But the fact that innovators put ideas into practise sets them apart from would-be innovators. Less creative businesses spend more time discussing ideas than acting on them.
- Failure Is a Possibility
Giving people the freedom and support to fail is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of corporate culture for a creative organisation. Employees are more ready to embark on hazardous, cutting-edge initiatives that have enormous potential returns for their organisations if they believe that failure won’t jeopardise their careers.
On the other hand, if workers think that taking part in a failed initiative would have a negative impact on their careers, they will shun risk and, by extension, creativity. More significantly, staff are far more likely to frequently examine projects and terminate those that are failing before the failure becomes too costly if top managers encourage early failure. This frees up funds and resources for brand-new, creative endeavours.
Employees often remain with unsuccessful initiatives in organisations where failure is not an option, allocating increasing amounts of resources in the belief that the project will finally succeed. Losses are larger and reputations are damaged when it doesn’t. As a consequence, businesses that encourage failure often succeed more often than those that do not.
- An atmosphere of trust
The Innovative organisation fosters a culture of trust among its staff. Innovation involves significant risk. Ideas that are very inventive can seem foolish at first. Employees won’t offer crazy ideas if they fear being mocked for doing so. Employees won’t take part in failing initiatives if they fear being punished for doing so (see item 5 above). Employees that don’t trust one another will always be looking over their shoulders.
Employees won’t share ideas if they believe management would take them and claim them as their own. On the other side, workers may be creative, execute ideas, and drive the company’s innovation if they feel they can take moderate risks without fear, that outlandish ideas are encouraged, and that their managers will support such ideas and give them credit for them. In other words, when workers in a company trust one another and their company, creativity and innovation flourish.
- Autonomy
Individual and group autonomy is a crucial element of invention, along with trust. Giving people and teams the opportunity to choose their own methods for reaching those goals while still providing them with defined objectives fosters creativity. The creativity and independent thinking required for innovation, however, are stifled when bosses micromanage their employees’ every action. Obviously, granting staff authority comes with the risk of errors.
They could choose ineffective strategies for reaching objectives. The worst case scenario is that they will learn from their errors and inefficiency. They will, at best, find new and more effective methods to achieve their goals. The fact that you can recruit smart, talented, and creative individuals and offer them the flexibility to solve challenges speaks for itself. And by doing this, they may contribute to more creativity throughout the whole organisation.
Benchmarks for Innovation
Since measuring innovation entails comparability so that quantitative comparisons may be made, measuring innovation is inherently challenging. But novelty is a necessary component of innovation. Thus, when comparing different items or services, comparisons are often useless. Nevertheless, Edison et al. discovered 232 innovation measures in their examination of the literature on innovation management. Inputs into the innovation process, output from the innovation process, impact of the innovation output, measures to access the activities in an innovation process, and availability of elements that support such a process are the five categories under which they grouped these metrics.
Measures for innovation may be taken at two separate levels: organizational and political.
- A level of an organization
The organizational level innovation measurement takes into include people, team evaluations, and private businesses of various sizes. Organizations may measure innovation using surveys, seminars, consultants, or internal benchmarking. Organizational innovation is currently not yet measured in any standardised manner.
Corporate metrics are often designed around balanced scorecards, which encompass a variety of innovation-related topics, including financial business metrics, the effectiveness of the innovation process, staff contributions and motivation, and consumer benefits. Measured metrics, which may include new product revenue, R&D expenditures, time to market, customer and staff perception and happiness, the number of patents, and extra revenues as a consequence of prior inventions, will differ greatly amongst organisations.
- Political Amount
Measures of innovation at the political level are primarily concerned with a nation’s or region’s ability to gain competitive advantage via innovation. In this context, a variety of assessment frameworks, including those of the European Foundation for Quality Management, may be used to assess an organization’s capabilities. Standard rules for evaluating technical product and process innovation are provided in the OECD Oslo Manual (1992). The 1963 Frascati Manual is seen as a supplement by some to the Oslo Manual. Marketing and organisational innovation are included in the new Oslo Manual from 2018, which takes a broader approach to innovation. For instance, the European Community Innovation Surveys make use of these standards.
Other metrics for innovation have historically included spending, such as the proportion of GNP invested in R&D (Research and Development) (Gross National Product). There has been much debate about whether this is an accurate indicator of innovation, and the Oslo Manual has taken some of the criticism levelled at past methods of assessment. Many policy choices are still influenced by the conventional measurement techniques. The Lisbon Strategy of the EU specifies as a target that their average R&D spending should be 3% of GDP.