Marketing

1. Drivers of Innovations

3. • Innovation helps organizations to grow. Growth, though measured in
turnover and profit, can also occur in knowledge, experience,
efficiency, and quality.
• Innovation is the process of making changes to existing, and it can be
radical or incremental, applied to products, processes, or services.
• It can happen at all levels, from management teams to departments
to individual.

4. • Various factors encourage and drive an organization to innovate. Each
of these drivers demands continuity and learning.
• These drivers create a sense of urgency to create new organizational
goals and generate new ideas for meeting these goals.
• The term innovation is often associated with products, but can also
occur in processes that make products, services, or deliver products
and services, including intangibles.

5. • Various factors encourage and drive an organization to innovate. Each
of these drivers demands continuity and learning.
• These drivers create a sense of urgency to create new organizational
goals and generate new ideas for meeting these goals.
• The term innovation is often associated with products, but can also
occur in processes that make products, services, or deliver products
and services, including new business models

6. This lecture focuses on :
• Innovation in the organizational context
• Describes concepts underlying innovation
• Tries to understand the core of the innovation process: What drives
innovation in organizations?

7. • There are factors that, singly and in combination, drive innovation
(successful innovation in particular)
• Those factors that motivate and shape innovation efforts, and in no
small way determine their success or failure

8. Drivers of Innovation
• 1. Corporate Culture
• 2. The individuals
• 3. The team
• 4. The Enterprise
• 5. Processes
• 6. Offerings
• 7. Psychological climate
• 8. Physical environment
• 9. Economic environment
• 10. Geo/political culture

9. 1. Corporate Culture
• Corporate culture dictates how people expect to work, and what the
“rules” are about how the organization is run.
• Wikipedia defines culture as the “attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values
of an organization”.
• When people join an organization, they usually adopt the culture of the
organization as well, reinforcing the belief systems and encouraging others
to adopt the culture as well
• Changing a culture is not easy, especially when you are asking a culture to
accept more failure and more risk.
• There are no quick fixes for cultural change; it requires leadership,
commitment, communication and time

10. Important elements in the corporate culture to
make a conducive environment for innovations
• Senior Management: The executive team needs to “walk the talk”
and show through their actions their commitment to innovation
efforts.
• Compensation: People do what they are compensated and motivated
to do. Change the compensation scheme to encourage people to take
risks and recognize they won’t be punished for doing so.

11. • Communication: Beyond the commitment of the leadership team, it’s
necessary for that commitment and the expectations of the
leadership team to be communicated to everyone in the organization,
consistently and repeatedly.
• Training: Training is a key component of cultural change, since it is
unrealistic to expect people to take on new responsibilities and
innovate consistently without giving them new tools, methods and
processes.

12. • Measurement: “What gets managed gets measured”, so goals,
measurements and metrics are a key part of any innovation initiative.
• As you begin your innovation initiative, you’ll have to measure
throughput – the number of ideas generated, the amount of
involvement throughout the organization and the amount of time it
takes to move an idea through your innovation process.
• Outcome based metrics can be created to measure the investment in
an innovation program against financial returns.

13. • Years of cost cutting and focus on process excellence have created in
many organizations a culture that is focused on operational
excellence and risk avoidance.
• Organizations (and people, for that matter) love stability and
predictability because these factors make it easier to earn profits.
• Innovation, however, is about adaptation, risk and change.
• It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of
what worked for you few years ago, but will soon be out of date

14. • Innovation will be one of the disciplines that also compete for scarce
resources and therefore the right choices have to be made about the
type of innovation that best match corporate objectives.
• Most innovations require substantial time to develop, mature as new
products or services and achieve market benefits
• In most organizations is that senior management requests more
innovation but expects results in one or two quarters, when the
average product or service development cycle is longer than that.

15. 2. The Individual
• You can ask “an organization” all day long to do something, but the
basic building block of getting things done is an individual.
• Organizations, departments, divisions, groups, teams, etc. all units
built from individual people.
• So focus on strengthening the primary building block to start moving
the needle on innovation.
• Understand this more deeply by reading “The weakness of “we” and
the power of “I” in innovation.”

16. 3. The Team
• Individuals make things happen, but in most cases, they can’t do it all
by themselves.
• Innovation requires multiple skill sets, whether it’s invention,
development, funding, marketing, patenting, operations, etc., those
skill sets almost never exist in one person, so multiple people are
needed to move it forward
• Focus on improving effective and collaborative team dynamics to
keep the innovation engine running smoothly

17. 4. The Enterprise
• A sad truth is that individuals, in teams, when successful, become
resistant to change.
• The successful innovation team of yesterday becomes the “this is the
way we’ve always done it” team of tomorrow.
• Focus should be given to creating and sustaining enterprise-wide
procedures, policies, metrics, and recognition and executive-level
accountability in order to keep the whole innovation vehicle running
in an organisation

18. • The Individual, Team and Enterprise are the most important drives of
the innovation. However, in order for the innovations to take place
smoothly, many other elements could play a vital role
• Processes, offerings, psychological climate, physical environment,
organization culture, economic climate/ market conditions and
geopolitical culture could be listed among them

19. 5.Processes
• The individual level (e.g. processes to enhancing self-awareness,
emotional intelligence and cognitive ability),
• The group level (e.g. using a structured “brainstorming” or “ideation”
or “creative process” to support teams in creating innovative
solutions)
• Enterprise level (e.g. the organizational system for creative
collaboration or procedures to protect innovation projects from being
robbed by the current “organizational favorite” profit generator).

20. 6. Offerings ( Products/Service)
• There are many ways to look at what is “an innovation”.
• To only see innovation as “a product” is to overlook services, business
models, alliances, processes, channels, and more.
• Expanding your scope to see that the BIG innovations were more than
just a simple “product,” can change the way you see the world.

21. 7. Psychological Climate
• What are the stories that the individual is telling him/herself about
what’s working? What’s not working? What’s acceptable? What’s our
industry? What’s its scope? Does this make a difference to
innovation?
• Absolutely, because how one defines the world will shape the
newness that they create and enable.
• The right amounts of personal freedom in the system, and the mental
energy to explore new areas are the primary impacts on the
psychological climate.

22. 8. Physical Environment
Physical space in which people work enables innovation
• Are people able to easily get together to communicate and work
together?
• Are they able to escape and think in peace and quiet?
• Can they find a space to spread out and dig into
prototypes/results/data?

23. 9. Organizational Culture
• It’s not enough to just say “Innovation is important!”
• The organizational policies, management behaviours, things that are
measured and executive messaging must all align to create the stories
of work that create the culture.
• If you want innovation over the long haul, look at company culture.

24. 9. Economic Climate/Market Conditions
• The spot where innovation culture is easiest to maintain is when
market conditions are such that there is not too much fear, or too
much confidence
• Paradoxically, research shows most organizations only get radically
innovative when they are in “distress situations.”
• When there’s no other choice, that’s when people start really
changing things up.

25. 10. Geopolitical Culture
• Where you were born, where you live, the language you speak, where
you work, how you were educated and the culture of those elements
all make a difference.
• We all know that different cultures communicate differently, see the
world differently, perceived different threats, and find value in
different things
• Every culture, every education system, has strength and weakness
• Curiously ask: “What cultural strengths can I leverage, and what
cultural impediments must I work to overcome?”

26. Other driving factors
• Type of ownership, Hiring right talent, skills, availability of technology,
leadership, relationships, and many more could matter in addition to
the major factors that we discussed.