Innovation Management – An Introduction

Innovation management - An introduction

Innovation management is considered as a combination of management processes, innovation, and change management. It involves product or service, business process, marketing the product, and organizational innovation.

The initial concept of innovation management was put forward by an Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in around the 1930s. According to him, innovation is considered a significantly important factor in economic growth.

Innovation management helps businesses to utilize the opportunities available in the market and use those opportunities to introduce new ideas, new processes, and new processes. Innovation is often combined with creativity. Creativity can be considered as the base for innovative ideas. Innovative ideas are identified as a result of two main factors, imitation and invention. Imitation helps the organizations to identify how a thing is happening and invention helps to further develop the product or the service to a level that it provides a new benefit or satisfies an unmet need.

Organizations use innovation management tools such as brainstorming, ideation, product life-cycle management, prototyping, project management, and phase-gate model to utilize the creative capabilities of the employees. These capabilities will be used for the continued growth and development of the organization through innovation. All the departments in the organization will be considered and the innovation possibilities of each department will be considered when developing the organization through innovative management techniques.

 The innovation management process can be identified as a combination of the organizational processes, procedures, market, technological options, and practices by iterating a set of activities namely: search, select, implement and capture.

The process of innovation can be divided into two segments namely pushed innovation and pulled innovation.

Pushed innovation- pushed innovation is based on the existing processes or newly invented processes that the organization can access and use for its development. The aim of this is to identify the most profitable technology and innovative application for the growth of the business.

Pulled innovation – pulled innovation is a contrasting process to the pushed innovation where the organization will take extra steps to find the unmet needs of the customers and finding innovative ways to satisfy those needs. It will involve creating a totally new method using innovativeness and creativity.

Organizations have the possibility of getting succeed in each innovation process if they have the ability to understand their market segment and customer requirements. By creating an innovation management team s that can operate multi-functionally on both pushed innovation methods and pulled innovation methods, the organizations have a higher possibility of succeeding.

Innovation has identified as one of the major requirements for businesses to survive and develop in the modern business world. The most commonly used innovation methods in the business industry are technological innovation, social innovation, and disruptive innovation. Some organizations use all three innovation types in their production processes while some organizations only prioritize one type of innovation and encourage that for survival and growth purposes.

However, the purpose of innovation management is to create a culture within the organization that helps the employees in the organization to think outside the box, become innovative and create new opportunities that can satisfy existing customer needs. It will motivate employees to think differently, find new and user-friendly ways of doing things while improving organizational performance and profitability. The innovation-friendly organizational environment will help the business to get more cooperation projects and new business ventures by expanding the business capacity. 

It is important for the business to identify the innovative capabilities clearly and encourage the concept of innovation through creative thinking. Overall, innovation management helps business organizations to explore new possibilities in the business world while satisfying the unmet needs of the customers.

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