Chapter 7: Innovation and Change

Components of Creative Environments

Encouragement from: -Organization -Supervisor -Work Group -Challenge -Lack of impediments -Freedom Two factors not mentioned in book that help: expertise & positive moods!

Unfreezing

Is getting the people affected by change to believe that change is needed.

Remove Impediments

To foster creativity, companies may also have to remove impediments to creativity from their work environments. Internal conflict and power struggles, rigid management structures, and a conservative bias toward the status quo can all discourage creativity. They create the perception that others in the organization will decide which ideas are acceptable and deserve support.

What to do when Employees Resist

Unfreeze- -Share Reasons -Empathize -Communicate Change- -Explain -Champion -Opportunities for feedback -Offer Security -Educate -Don't Rush Freeze-

Milestones

are formal project review points used to assess progress and performance. By making people regularly assess what they're doing, how well they're performing, and whether they need to take corrective action, milestones provide structure to the general chaos that follows technological discontinuities. Regularly meeting milestones gives people a sense of accomplishment and can shorten the innovation process by creating a sense of urgency that keeps people on task.

Multi functional Teams

are work teams composed of people from different departments. Multifunctional teams accelerate learning and understanding by mixing and integrating technical, marketing, and manufacturing activities. By involving all key departments in development from the start, multifunctional teams speed innovation through early identification of new ideas or problems that would typically not have been generated or addressed until much later.

Compression Approach to Innovation

assumes that innovation is a predictable process, that incremental innovation can be planned using a series of steps, and that compressing the time it takes to complete those steps can speed up innovation. The compression approach to innovation has five aspects: planning, supplier involvement, shortening the time of individual steps, overlapping steps, and multifunctional teams.

Experiential Approach to Innovation

assumes that innovation is occurring within a highly uncertain environment and that the key to fast product innovation is to use intuition, flexible options, and hands-on experience to reduce uncertainty and accelerate learning and understanding. The experiential approach to innovation has five aspects: design iterations, testing, milestones, multifunctional teams, and powerful leaders.

Design Iteration

is a cycle of repetition in which a company tests a prototype of a new product or service, improves on the design, and then builds and tests the improved product or service prototype.

Product Prototype

is a full-scale working model that is being tested for design, function, and reliability.

Flow

is a psychological state of effortlessness, in which you become completely absorbed in what you're doing and time seems to fly. When flow occurs, who you are and what you're doing become one.

Testing

is a systematic comparison of different product designs or design iterations. Companies that want to create a new dominant design following a technological discontinuity quickly build, test, improve, and retest a series of different product prototypes.

Freedom

means having autonomy over one's day-to-day work and a sense of ownership and control over one's ideas.

Generational Change

occurs when incremental improvements are made to a dominant technological design such that the improved version of the technology is fully backward compatible with the older version.

Organizational Encouragement

occurs when management encourages risk taking and new ideas, supports and fairly evaluates new ideas, rewards and recognizes creativity, and encourages the sharing of new ideas throughout different parts of the company.

Supervisory Encouragement

occurs when supervisors provide clear goals, encourage open interaction with subordinates, and actively support development teams' work and ideas.

Powerful Leaders

provide the vision, discipline, and motivation to keep the innovation process focused, on time, and on target. Powerful leaders are able to get resources when they are needed, are typically more experienced, have high status in the company, and are held directly responsible for the products' success or failure. On average, powerful leaders can get innovation-related projects done nine months faster than leaders with little power or influence.

Planning for incremental innovation

the goal is to squeeze or compress development time as much as possible, and the general strategy is to create a series of planned steps to accomplish that goal. Planning for incremental innovation helps avoid unnecessary steps and enables developers to sequence steps in the right order to avoid wasted time and delays between steps. Planning also reduces misunderstandings and improves coordination.

Change Intervention

the process used to get workers and managers to change their behaviors and work practices

Refreezing

the process used to get workers and managers to change their behaviors and work practices.

Work Group Encouragement

when group members have diverse experience, education, and backgrounds, and the group fosters mutual openness to ideas; positive, constructive challenge to ideas; and shared commitment to ideas.

Creative work environments

workplace cultures in which workers perceive that new ideas are welcomed, valued, and encouraged. creative work environments have six components that encourage creativity: challenging work, organizational encouragement, supervisory encouragement, work group encouragement, freedom, and a lack of organizational impediments.

Compression (Incremental)

•Certain environments •Series of steps •Goal: Faster/cheaper

Experiential (Discontinuous)

•Uncertain environments •Intuition, flexibility •Goal: New product/service