5. innovation at work fast track employment

Innovation at work – fast track employment Tutor Name Here

Learning Objectives

• At the end of this module you will have a greater understanding of :

• The role of innovation in organizational structures, including:

The adoption of innovation and Innovation management

• How to detect opportunities for innovation

• How to structure convincing proposals

• Think about what your personal definition of innovation is.

• Now consider this definition by Edison et al “Innovation is: production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome.". Edison et al

• From this it is easy to understand why innovation is important in the work place as it leads to:

• More effective products, processes and ideas• Business who innovate are more efficient- helps save money

and time• Gives your business a competitive advantage- you are abatable

in the market• Demonstrates a strong ability to lead and high levels of

motivation and market awareness• A successful innovative company means valuable human capital

Hence: Innovation is vital in business and people who are able to be innovative are more advantageous to employers. This module aims to raise the awareness of the importance of innovating and methods which to utilize innovative thinking in work.

Innovation Adoption Cycle“The early bird catches the first worm”

• This is a model that classifies adopters of innovation based on readiness to accept new ideas.

• The diffusion of adoptors is classified into groups early adoptors, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

• Innovation thinkers need to be ready to adapt and accept changes in order for development to follow suit.

• The innovation adaption curve is a model that classifies adopters of innovations based on their level of readiness to accept new ideas. 

• Innovative adoption characteristics are assigned to groups to show that all innovations go through a predictable process before becoming widely adopted. The groups consist of early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.

Innovation adoption cycle

• The graph in the previous slide represents (lucidly) the % of the population considered to be each type of adaptor to innovation.

• There are official classifications of adopters of innovation are going to be discussed in the following slides:

• Adopter Category #1: Innovators — If you rapidly latch on to products when they’re first introduced, then you’re probably an Innovator. Innovators are eager to try new ideas and products, almost as an obsession. They typically have higher incomes and they are worldlier and more active outside their community. Innovators also rely less on group norms and are more self-confident; they get their information more from scientific sources and experts. This is the group that you always see waiting in line for the new Apple products, regardless of the weather or temperature.

• Adopter Category #2: Early Adopters — The second group adopts new products early in the product life cycle. Early Adopters rely more on group norms and values, as opposed to Innovators who rely on their own values. They are active inside their community and they want the respect of others. This group is the one to market towards since they are the opinion leaders and encourage their group of family and friends to buy a new product.

• Adopter Category #3: Early Majority — Early Majority consumers collect more information about the product and will weigh the pros and cons before they make a decision. They listen to their opinion leaders and will rely on their groups’ opinions instead of forming them for themselves. They’re an important group nonetheless and should not be ignored! Early Majority group members are positioned between the earlier and later adopters and are deliberate in their data collection process.

• Adopter Category #4: Late Majority — These people are considered more skeptical. Late Majority consumers adopt a new product mainly because their friends have all adopted them and they feel the need to conform. This group is typically older and has below average income and social status. They listen to word-of-mouth communication over mass media, since they trust their friends more.

• Adopter Category #5: Laggards — Laggards do not rely on group norms and values, just like Innovators. Their past heavily influences their current decision process. By the time Laggards adopt an innovation it has been possibly outmoded and replaced by something new and flashy. They are extremely suspicious and feel alienated from a rapidly changing society. This group probably bought their first black-and-white TV after color television was already dominantly used. Marketers and advertisers tend to ignore Laggards since they are not motivated by advertising or personal selling and will only purchase a new product when they absolutely have to.

• Another useful aspect of the classifications are that they come with advice for how to handle people with different propensities for innovation, this can be used as self criticism/ advice...

• As evidently suggested the level to which you are willing to adapt is affected by certain elements for example these can be self- confidence, peer reliance and interpersonal communication.

• Innovation is relative to the person and situation, a technology laggard isn’t necessarily a laggard in all innovative respects, it is just their propensity for innovations in technology. Working with various people on different categories of the model is enviable so here is some pointers on how to identify and work with all types of innovators

How to work with innovators:• Track them down and become their “first followers”,

providing support and publicity for their ideas. • Invite keen innovators to be partners in designing your

project.

How to work with early adopters: • Offer strong face-to-face support for a limited number of early

adopters to trial the new idea. • Study the trials carefully to discover how to make the idea

more convenient, low cost and marketable. • Reward their egos e.g. with media coverage. • Promote them as fashion leaders (beginning with the cultish

end of the media market). • Recruit and train some as peer educators. • Maintain relationships with regular feedback.

How to work with the early majority: • Offer give-aways or competitions to stimulate buzz. • Use mainstream advertising and media stories featuring

endorsements from credible, respected, similar folks. • Lower the entry cost and guarantee performance. • Redesign to maximise ease and simplicity. • Cut the red tape: simplify application forms and instructions. • Provide strong customer service and support.

How to work with the late majority: • Focus on promoting social norms rather than just product

benefits: they’ll want to hear that plenty of other conservative folks like themselves think it’s normal.

• Keep refining the product to increase convenience and reduce costs.

• Emphasise the risks of being left behind. • Respond to criticisms from laggards.

How to work with laggards: • Give them high levels of personal control over

when, where, how and whether they do the new behaviour.

• Maximise their familiarity with new products or behaviours. Let them see exactly how other laggards have successfully adopted the innovation

Each of these adopter personalities is very different. It’s vital to know which one you are addressing at a given time.

Innovation Management• Innovation management:  Is the management of innovation processes. It

refers both to product and organizational innovation.

• A key fundamental requirement for being able to managing innovation is to be able to measure and assess the various aspects of the process of innovation and its outcome

• Tools for Innovation management?

• Consider what is innovation management?

• Innovation management is based on some of the ideas put forth by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, working during the 1930s, who identified innovation as a significant factor in economic growth.

• Innovation is a top priority for many CEOs, who look to new products as the engines for growth and transformation. However, translating aspirations into reality requires treating product innovation as a key business process linking upstream to overall portfolio management, and downstream to product development and commercialization

Innovation management tools •A key fundamental requirement for being able to managing innovation is to be able to measure and assess the various aspects of the process of innovation and its outcome

•By utilizing innovation management tools, management can trigger and deploy the creative capabilities of the work force for the continuous development of a company. Common tools include brainstorming, virtual prototyping, product lifecycle management, idea management, Phase–gate model, project management, product line planning and portfolio management.

E.G. Product life cycle• The product life cycle is a description of the life of

a product, from its launch to its final withdrawal from the market. Using this analysis will help a business decide whether it is worth investing further in a product.

• (Think about a product/idea developed or made up and take them through the steps you would go through with the PLC in order to decide whether or not you would develop this idea/ product)

Stage 1 – Introduction & launchStage 2 – Growth & developmentStage 3 – Maturity & competitionStage 3 – Maturity & competition

Innovation Management • https://youtu.be/WjXConbBAAI-

Innovation habits that every Organisation needs• Innovation takes many

shapes and forms and there is no single formula for successful innovation

• Innovation requires fostering and leadership, in order to stimulate innovation fully there are certain traits habits that companies should adapt.

1. Be unreasonably aspirational• EXAMPLE- Netflix was another brand with an

unreasonably aspirational vision. It had built a successful online DVD rental business, but leadership saw that the future of the industry would be in video streaming, not physical media. The management team saw how quickly broadband technology was evolving and made a strategic bet that placed it at the forefront of a surge in real-time entertainment. As the video-streaming market took off, Netflix quickly captured nearly a third of downstream video traffic. By the end of 2013, Netflix had more than 40 million streaming subscribers.

2. Acquire capabilities• EXAMPLE-Tesco, the UK grocery retailer, made

three significant digital acquisitions over a two-year span: blinkbox, a video-streaming service; We7, a digital music store; and Mobcast, an e-book platform. The acquisitions enabled Tesco to quickly build up the skills it needed to move into digital media. In the United States, Verizon followed a similar path with strategic acquisitions that immediately bolstered its expertise in telematics (Hughes Telematics in 2012) and cloud services (CloudSwitch in 2011), two markets that are growing at a rapid pace.

3. ‘Ring fence’ and cultivate talent• EXAMPLE- Walmart-Four years ago, the retail giant’s

online business was lagging. It was late to the e-commerce market as executives protected their booming physical-retail business. When it did step into the digital space, talent was disbursed throughout the business. Its $5 billion in online sales in 2011 paled next to Amazon’s $48 billion.

• In 2011, however, Wal-Mart established @WalmartLabs, an “idea incubator,” as part of its growing e-commerce division in Silicon Valley—far removed from the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters. The group’s innovations, including a unified company-wide e-commerce platform, helped Wal-Mart increase online revenues by 30 percent in 2013, outpacing Amazon’s rate of growth.

4. Challenge everything• EXAMPLE-Think of Apple’s transformation from

struggling computer maker into (among other things) the world’s largest music retailer, or eBay’s transition from online bazaar to global e-commerce platform. OR n 2007, car-rental company Hertz started to deploy self-service kiosks similar to those used by airlines for flight check-in. In 2011, it leapfrogged airlines by moving to dual-screen kiosks—one screen to select rental options via touch screen, a second screen at eye level to communicate with a customer agent using real-time video.

5. Be quick and data drivenEXAMPLE- U.S. Xpress, a US transportation company, collects data in real time from tens of thousands of sources, including in-vehicle sensors and geospatial systems. Using Apache Hadoop, an open-source tool set for data analysis, and real-time business-intelligence tools, U.S. Xpress has been able to extract game-changing insights about its fleet operations. For example, looking at the fuel consumption of idling vehicles led to changes that saved the company more than $20 million in fuel consumption in the first year alone.

6. Follow the moneyEXAMPLE- P&G collaborated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to create statistical methods to streamline processes and increase uptime at its factories, saving more than $1 billion a year.

7. Be obsessed with the customerRising customer expectations continue to push businesses to improve the customer experience across all channels. Excellence in one channel is no longer sufficient; customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa. 

Identifying opportunities for innovation• Group work – come up with 7 ways to identify

innovation opportunities

Identifying opportunities for Innovation

“fixing of problems.”

Look for your blind spots.

Identify where you have been making decisions while in the dark.

Highlight your big failures.

Identify the biggest threats.

Focus on fear. Get scared

Look for the “lost causes.”

Identify resource-leakage.

Pinpoint your weaknesses.

Find your routines, and break them

•  “fixing of problems.” Innovation need not be strictly the development of new products or services; there’s plenty of opportunity to be had by focusing on existing business methods, processes, structure and methodologies.

• Look for your blind spots. Where are you lacking information which leads to missed opportunities in your marketplace, failure to provide stellar customer service or excessive operating costs? Undertake a simple “information inventory,” with the idea of identifying where you are lacking in the critical insight you need to be innovative.

• Identify where you have been making decisions while in the dark. As part of inventory, identify the situations where you’ve missed opportunities, have made the wrong decision, or have been misfocused because you simply had the wrong information, or have had the right information at the wrong time. You could call this your insight deficit. That’s one of the first areas that you can focus on for innovative opportunities.

• Highlight your big failures. Where did things really go wrong: where are there excessive issues concerning quality, customer relationships, time to market or other aspects of your organization where you have simply failed to do what should have been done? If you take the time to find and confront your biggest foul-ups, you’ll discover plenty of opportunities for innovation.

• Identify the biggest threats. undertake an assessment of the biggest challenges that you might face on a six month, one year and five year horizon. Where might new competitors emerge? What current shortcomings might cause you to miss opportunities? Where might “blurring” within your industry or market sector occur as a result of continuous product or service evolution?

• Focus on fear. Get scared. Look to your competition for insight on what you might be missing. What is the most innovative thing that they are doing? What levels of risk and creativity are they willing to deal with that you aren’t? And what is the real impact if you don’t do something drastic right now to catch up?

• Look for the “lost causes.” Where are you simply wasting a lot of time, doing things that you shouldn’t be doing? For example, do you have a sales force that spends more time looking for information and insight into specific customers than they do selling? A marketing team that is still focused on fighting the brand wars of yesterday as opposed to the ridiculously fast changing consumer preferences of today? Where are you simply spending too much time undertaking futile activities?

• Identify resource-leakage. Where is valuable talent being unnecessarily diverted? Is your management team constantly fighting fires, rather than focusing on strategy and opportunity? Do you have a customer service staff that is busy putting data into twelve different databases, rather than fixing customer problems? Take the time to figure out where you are wasting a lot of valuable time doing things you shouldn’t be doing.

• Pinpoint your weaknesses. List the things you can’t do, but that you should be able to do. Where can you see shortcomings in your capabilities compared to the competition or high fliers in other industries? Who are you losing business and employees to and why? And what could you be doing differently to avoid these problems?

• Find your routines, and break them. What are you doing that is absolutely, positively ridiculous – but you keep on doing it because you’ve always done it that way?

Creating Convincing Proposals“With great power comes great responsibility”

• Once you have this great innovative idea you then need to create an even more convincing proposal.

• Following these steps will make achieving this more possible

Planning the proposal

Define your

audience

Define your issue

Define your

solution

Keep elements of style in mind

Make an outline

Writing the proposal

Start with a firm intro

State the problem

Propose solutions

Include a schedule

and budget

Wrap up with a

conclusion

Edit and proofread your work

Planning is key1. define the reader- Who will be reading your

proposal? What level of familiarity with your topic will they have? What might you need to define or give extra background information about? What do you want your audience to get from your proposal? What do you need to give your readers so they can make the decision you want them to make?

2. Define the issue- It is clear to you what the issue is, but is that also clear to your reader? Also, does your reader believe you really know what you are talking about? 

3. Define your solution- Once you set the issue you're addressing, how would you like to solve it?  Is the solution you're offering logical and feasible? What's the timeline for your implementation?

4. Keep elements of style in mind- Depending on your proposal and who'll be reading it, you need to cater your paper to fit a certain style. Think about the level of jargon (specialized technical language) you should employ. Effective writing steers clear of jargon unless you simply can't explain a concept without it.

5. Make an outline- Make sure you know all of the relevant details before you start.

Writing the proposal1. Start with a firm intro- hook the readers in. Grab

attention right away

2. State the problem- emphasise the urgency of your problem and why it should be solved now

3. Propose solutions- “state of affairs section” don't beat around the bush, be exact and offer your solution strongly

4. Include a schedule and budget- Your proposal represents an investment. In order to convince your readers that you're a good investment, provide as much detailed, concrete information about your timeline and budget as possible.

5. Wrap up with a firm conclusion- This should mirror your introduction, succinctly wrapping up your general message. 

6. Edit and proofread work- Make sure to take time look for mistakes and errors that could downgrade the quality of your proposal.

Exercise: Barrington Brands

• Read Case Study• Identify areas for Innovation• Develop and present a 10 min

PowerPoint presentation (5 slides max) to persuade Company Management to adopt your innovation suggestion