Creating, Supporting And Sustaining A Culture Of Innovation Case Study

Challenges

After all the product innovations we have seen in above examples, it might sound convincing that product innovation is an essential part to become a market leader. But the job is far from over. We need to look in the factors like speed of innovation, innovations in complementary products, service quality and role of competitors in order to succeed. Organizations with culture which encourages innovation and creativeness are definitely stand definitely at higher ground than those who don’t. As Heather McCune in her editorial on sustaining innovation says, “It is not about becoming a market leader. The work is about sustaining it.” Creating and supporting a culture of innovation thus becomes extremely important for an organization.
In the article, ‘Creating, supporting and sustaining a culture of innovation’, Steele, J., & Murray, M. advocate a strategy ensuring many factors including: adequate creative ability at every level in organization; identification of creative potential of employees; analyzing opportunity in all projects to exercise creativity. These factors are to be then mapped and appropriate matching of tasks and people is to be ensured. Thus it creates an environment where creative ideas are not rejected out. Also they are well placed with the current plans. In fact, creative ideas for ongoing projects need to be encouraged and analyzed particularly during the early stages.

Another difficulty that arises is defining product innovation. This arises because of differences in goals of various organization. The differences in goals can also be attributed to differences customer segment and time at which the purchase is made. When we look in e commerce industry, we see model drifting towards monopolistic with one-two major player. Lately we have also witnessed a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the industry. Hence we assume the goal to become a market leader and to sustain that
Carbonell & Rodríguez Escudero (2010) studied the effect of market orientation on innovation speed and new product performance in sample 247 firms. The three key components looked for insights into innovation speed were intelligence generation, dissemination and responsiveness. Intelligence generation refers to the insight firm generates about the customers and the market. Intelligence dissemination refers to the information distribution, by both formal and informal methods, in the market by the competitors. More the information dissemination, it would allow the players to work on their activity with a better perspective of industry needs and limitations. Also, higher the responsiveness of a firm better would be the speed innovation. This is the general trend observed, although the upper limits do exist. The amount of time a firm has been is business will help them accumulate their learning. They tend to have better organizational routines. (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990)