Recommend Ways to Incorporate Innovation in a Company

Recommend Ways to Incorporate Innovation in a Company

Constraints or Barriers to Innovation

According to Abdel-Razek and Alsanad (2014), one of the strongest barriers to innovation and creativity in a company is rigid or uncooperative management that does no appreciate new ideas. In this regard, top management does not show any support for innovative ideas either from its employees or buying new ways and strategies of doing things. In fact, the management prefers to stick to the old models and approach of doing things. This has detrimental effects as it reduces efficient operation of the company as well as its ability to create significant value and capturing it (Coad, Pellegrino & Savona, 2015).

Another barrier to innovation in organizations is the failure to encourage or facilitate learning among its workforce (Evalueserve, 2015).  For a person or an organization to keep up with innovation competitors, learning is a critical because it helps in brainstorm, collaborate and sharing of ideas.  Therefore, a company that does not encourage its people to learn or that lacks established learning structures hinders its team from being innovative.

Lack of leveraging is a central barrier to innovation. Also, shortage of funding in established or start-up organizations act as a barrier to innovation (Abdel-Razek & Alsanad, 2014). Channeling startup funds to innovation will imply that the company is taking finances that are meant for onset programs (Abdel-Razek & Alsanad, 2014).  Moe so, getting the funds at the right time has proved to be a problem because most organization depend on annual funding cycles that are not in perfect match with the real-world opportunities (Abdel-Razek & Alsanad, 2014). Most important, most innovative initiatives or activities in an organization requires more than money to sustain. Poor leveraging includes lack of collaboration, ideation, implementation, and value creation.  

Leverage Various outside Constituencies in Innovation

Leveraging various constituents in innovations implies the various approach that can be used by an organization to encourage, nurture develop and implement innovation in the day-to-day activities of the business (Davila, Epstein, Shelton, Cagan, & Vogel, 2013).  One of the approaches that can be used to leverage innovation is collaboration. Adopting effective collaboration is paramount because it helps is avoiding tension and encouraging re-thinking, brainstorming, and sharing of ideas (Evalueserve, 2015).

An organization that is set to leverage its innovation should ensure it creates value across its chain of innovation. This should be extended to the value chain through setting up a process for tracking the success of its innovation initiative (Evalueserve, 2015).  This is vital because it helps innovation managers to track downstream challenges and make informed decisions. In addition, understanding the reward system is critical for the team exploring the disruptive ideas (Evalueserve, 2015). Thus, it is paramount for the company to collaborate across all its functions in order to make effective ideas fruitful.  

Ideation is another approach that helps in leveraging innovation. This approach includes strengthening and expanding organizations internal and external networks so as to generate an influx of ideas that will create solutions to the business problems (Evalueserve, 2015).

Summary Response and Analysis

The top management is developing strategies that are aimed towards encouraging innovation among the workers. These strategies include developing a recruitment team that will ensure that creative and innovative employees are sourced from the company and learning avenues to help employees gain the needed skills and knowledge to generate innovative ideas. Moreover, the company is coming up with leveraging measures such as sourcing finances from sponsors and stakeholders to established innovation centers that are business oriented.

Everyone in the company devotes their daily attention to coming up with a better business model. This is initiative is encouraged during lunch break where employees are cheered to give their input regarding the existing business model and how it can be improved. For instance, the company is considering adopting open and all level management approach as opposed to the existing hierarchical model. 

The company’s strategy to innovate is communicated to people at all levels, this is supported by the fact that the company encourages workers at all levels to contribute and share their innovative ideas. Moreover, the impact of this move is assessed at all levels. Bureaucracy has no place in delaying our innovation initiate. In fact, the value creation in the company is dependent on the level of innovation and every person at any level clearly understands this. Additionally, management is supportive of new ideas through shortening the process in which innovative ideas and measures have to go through. Some of the things that may make innovation to be ineffective are insufficient leveraging (Davila, Epstein, Shelton, Cagan, & Vogel, 2013). For instance, there is shortage of capital to implement creative ideas and innovation. In some cases, some of the innovative measures may not actually create value for the client and thus the company may not nurture such value and thus there is a reluctance to implement such ideas (Abdel-Razek & Alsanad, 2014).

The company leverages its internal talents through innovative networks with suitable partners which help to create an influx of ideas that can be used in creating solutions to the business problems. The company has a robust reward and compensation strategy that gives tokens and bonus to best innovative ideas thus encouraging members to cooperate and be competitive.

The best innovative idea is a combination of deep thinking and collaboration. In fact, when I think of an idea, I visualize it and develop a blueprint and then present it to the team for critique, analysis, and examination to ensure that it is appropriate for business. The most memorable time when I used an innovative approach is when I came up with a plan of training our technical department to ensure that they are well equipped with knowledge and skills which helped the company to save greatly in terms of external consultancy, hiring outside professionals, streamlining production process, and in fact systems that used to be hired from outside vendors are now developed by our team. To achieve this, I came up with an idea and plan articulating that the technical department should be equipped with knowledge, skills, and equipment to help save resources and time wasted by the company in sourcing outside services.

To be able to balance the essence of coming up with something creative and useful or functional, I ensure that my creative or innovative plans create value both for the company and the consumers. The best innovative strategies we are using to ensure we remain relevant to the changes in the industry is through learning new ways of doing things that will help us to be competitive. This has helped us to keep up to date with the changes and even be ahead of some competitors through adding value to our consumers. Though a rare event, I have seen new and experienced employees struggle with technology, actually this is the major reason why such people get stuck on the problem. In most cases, these employees land to such situations due to lack of collaboration or insufficient cooperation with the rest of the team (Coad, Pellegrino & Savona, 2015). That’s why the company emphasizes the importance of teamwork.  

Relationship with Best Practices

The responses issued relate to the best practices that I have come across. For a company to innovative, it should ensure to source creative and innovative employees who will constantly improve through training and learning programs. Collaboration and teamwork are elusive to an organization because it helps in sharing and developing ideas that amount to innovative methods of doing things. To achieve and sustain innovation, it needs to be leveraged through various measures such as financial support, training, robust reward and compensation strategy among others. To keep up with the trends in the industry, to remain competitive, and to add value both to the employee, customers and the company, it is vital for the company to remain innovative.  

Recommendations Based On the Current Process and Best Practices

One of the immediate action or plan that should be put in place is learning program. In this regard, the company should establish itself as a learning organization to ensure its entire workforce is taught how to be innovative and solve problems using simple and effective measures. Moreover, interpersonal collaboration should also be emphasized among the new employees and the existing ones. This will help to reduce time taken in solving problems that can be easily solved using innovative approaches (Evalueserve, 2015). Linkages should be further emphasized to ensure a strong commitment to not only training people but also helping them to develop. In this case, the organization should aspire to invest its employees in a worldwide education and training both at in-house and partnership with academic institutions (Abdel-Razek & Alsanad, 2014). The organization should enhance its strategy through setting up a process to review new technologies in the market that will fit the plan of the firm. Emphasis should be placed on top management to support and show commitment to innovation through ensuring that there are enough finances through budget allocation, sponsors and collaboration to supportive innovation ideas and aligning them with the needs of the consumers.

Recommend Ways to Incorporate Innovation in a Company