Management Ch. 7

Design Iteration

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

Technology Cycle

a cycle that begins with the birth of a new technology and ends when that technology reaches its limits and is replaced by a newer, substantially better technology.

Organizational Change

a difference in the form, quality, or condition of an organization over time.

Product Prototype

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

Organizational Decline

a large decrease in organizational performance that occurs when companies don't anticipate, recognize, neutralize, or adapt to the internal or external pressures that threaten their survival.

Dominant Design

a new technological design or process that becomes the accepted market standard

S curve

a pattern of technological innovation characterized by slow initial progress, then rapid progress, and then slow progress again as a technology matures and reaches its limits.

Organization Development

a philosophy and collection of planned change interventions designed to improve an organization's long-term health and performance.

Flow

a psychological state of effortlessness, in which you become completely absorbed in what you're doing and time seems to pass quickly.

General Electric Workout

a three day meeting in which managers and employees from different levels and parts of an organization quickly generate and act on solutions to specific business problems.

Experiential Approach to Innovation

an approach to innovation that assumed a highly uncertain environments and uses intuition, flexible options, and hands-on experience to reduce uncertainty and accelerate learning and understanding.

Compression Approach to Innovation

an approach to innovation that assumed that incremental innovation can be planned using a series of steps and that compressing those steps can speed innovation.

Generational Change

change based on incremental improvements to a dominant technological design such that the improved technology is fully backward compatible with the older technology.

Results Driven Change

change created quickly by focusing on the measurement and improvement of results.

Discontinuous Change

characterized by technological substitution and design competition.

Design Competition

competition between old and new technologies to establish a new technological standard or dominant design.

Change Forces

forces that produce differences in the form, quality, or condition of an organization over time.

Resistance Forces

forces that support the existing state of conditions in organizations.

Milestones

formal project review points used to assess progress and performance.

Unfreezing

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

Resistance to Change

opposition to change resulting from self interest, misunderstanding and distrust, and a general intolerance for change.

Innovation Streams

patterns of innovation over time that can create sustainable competitive advantage

Refreezing

supporting and reinforcing new changes so that they stick.

Change Agent

the person formally in charge of guiding a change effort

Incremental Change

the phase of a technology cycle in which companies innovate by lowering costs and improving the functioning and performance of the dominant technological design.

Change Intervention

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

Creativity

the production of novel and useful ideas.

Technological Substitution

the purchase of new technologies to replace older ones.

Organizational Innovation

the successful implementation of creative ideas in organizations.

Testing

the systematic comparison of different product design or design iterations.

Coercion

using formal power and authority to force others to change.

Technological Lockout

when a new dominant design (i.e. a significantly better technology) prevents a company from competitively selling its products or makes it difficult to do so.

Technological Discontinuity

when a scientific advance or a unique combination of existing technologies creates a significant breakthrough in performance or function; what an innovation stream begins with

Multifunctional Teams

work teams composed of people from different departments.

Creative Work Environments

workplace cultures in which workers perceive that new ideas are welcomed, valued, and encouraged.