Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, 2nd Edition - Softcover

Von Stamm, Bettina

 
9780470510667: Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, 2nd Edition
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0470510668 ISBN 13: 9780470510667
Publisher: Wiley, 2008

Synopsis

Innovation is the major driving force in organisations today. With the rise of truly global markets and the intensifying competition for customers, employees and other critical resources, the ability to continuously develop successful innovative products, services, processes and strategies is essential. While creativity is the starting point for any kind of innovation, design is the process through which a creative idea or concept is translated into reality. Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, 2nd Edition brings these three strands together in a discussion built around a collection of up-to-date case studies.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Dr. Bettina von Stamm, a renowned expert in her field, is passionate about understanding and enabling innovation. For this purpose she has set up the Innovation Leadership Forum, part of which is a Networking group to exchange and add further knowledge around innovation. Current members contributing their innovation expertise include, BASF, Cancer Research UK, Cargill, ICI Paints, Marks & Spencer, Masterfoods, the National Health Innovation Institute, Nestle, Ordnance Survey, Smith & Nephew, Unilever and Visteon. Dr von Stamm also teaches and conducts research in design and innovation management at a number of leading universities in the US, Germany and the UK.

From the Back Cover

There is no doubt about it, innovation is the major driving force in organisations today. With the rise of truly global markets and the intensifying competition for customers, employees and other critical resources, the ability to continuously develop successful innovative products, services, processes and strategies is essential. While creativity is the starting point for any kind of innovation, design is the process through which a creative idea or concept is translated into reality. Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity 2nd edition brings these three strands together in a discussion built around a collection of up-to-date case studies.

New features to this edition:

  • Insights into how innovation and knowledge of innovation management has evolved since the beginning of the millennium
  • Exploration of leading edge topics such as understanding discontinuous innovation, open innovation and user-led innovation
  • The new chapter is supported with two new case studies
  • Stronger emphasis on the role of design, using Procter & Gamble and BMW as examples.
  • General expansion and revision of other chapters according to current research

Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, 2nd edition has been written for students on innovation and design courses, and also for business managers with responsibility for innovation within their organizations.

Dr Bettina von Stamm, a renowned expert in her field, is passionate about understanding and enabling innovation. For this purpose she has set up the Innovation Leadership Forum, part of which is a Networking Group to exchange and add further knowledge around innovation. Current members contributing their innovation expertise include BASF, Cancer Research UK, Cargill, ICI Paints, Marks & Spencer, Masterfoods, The National Health Innovation Institute, Nestle, Ordnance Survey, Smith & Nephew, Unilever and Visteon). Dr von Stamm also teaches and conducts research in design and innovation management at a number of leading universities in the US, Germany and the UK.

From the Inside Flap

There is no doubt about it, innovation is the major driving force in organisations today. With the rise of truly global markets and the intensifying competition for customers, employees and other critical resources, the ability to continuously develop successful innovative products, services, processes and strategies is essential. While creativity is the starting point for any kind of innovation, design is the process through which a creative idea or concept is translated into reality. Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity 2nd edition brings these three strands together in a discussion built around a collection of up-to-date case studies.

New features to this edition:

  • Insights into how innovation and knowledge of innovation management has evolved since the beginning of the millennium
  • Exploration of leading edge topics such as understanding discontinuous innovation, open innovation and user-led innovation
  • The new chapter is supported with two new case studies
  • Stronger emphasis on the role of design, using Procter & Gamble and BMW as examples.
  • General expansion and revision of other chapters according to current research

Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity, 2nd edition has been written for students on innovation and design courses, and also for business managers with responsibility for innovation within their organizations.

Dr Bettina von Stamm, a renowned expert in her field, is passionate about understanding and enabling innovation.  For this purpose she has set up the Innovation Leadership Forum, part of which is a Networking Group to exchange and add further knowledge around innovation. Current members contributing their innovation expertise include BASF, Cancer Research UK, Cargill, ICI Paints, Marks & Spencer, Masterfoods, The National Health Innovation Institute, Nestle, Ordnance Survey, Smith & Nephew, Unilever and Visteon). Dr von Stamm also teaches and conducts research in design and innovation management at a number of leading universities in the US, Germany and the UK.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity

By Bettina von Stamm

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Bettina von Stamm
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-51066-7

Chapter One

What are innovation, creativity and design?

This chapter provides an introduction to innovation, design and creativity. It sets out the meaning of these words in the context of this book, how they fit together, and introduces some useful frameworks for the subjects.

INNOVATION

New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. John Locke

Innovation, just as many other things in management and life, means different things to different people. What does innovation mean in the context of this book?

Often 'creativity' and 'innovation' are used interchangeably. However, there are fundamental differences. In fact, creativity is an essential building block for innovation. This is reflected in the now widely accepted definition of innovation equalling creativity plus (successful) implementation. Creativity alone, to come up with ideas, is not enough. In order to reap the benefits one needs to do something with it. History tells many tales of great inventors who were not able to reap the benefits of their labour, think of the x-ray scanner, invented by EMI but made a commercial success by General Electric, VCRs which had been invented by Ampex/Sony but were successfully commercialised by Matsushita, or the vacuum cleaner, invented by a Mr Spengler but commercialised by Hoover. Why might that be? Let's take a closer look at the two components of innovation, creativity and implementation.

Implementation - putting ideas into practice - is made up of three aspects: idea selection, development and commercialisation, and of course creativity is needed here too. What do organisations need to achieve implementation? They need processes, procedures and structures that allow the timely and effective execution of projects; implementation is about team effort. But even companies that have all the right processes, procedures and structures in place are often unable to be innovative.

Taking a closer look at creativity might help to explain why that might be. If implementation is putting an idea into practice, creativity is coming up with the idea in the first place. Creativity is an essential part of innovation - it is the point of departure. One of the big concerns for many companies is therefore how to generate more and better ideas - how to become more creative. Consider a few things about creativity:

As opposed to commonly held opinion, creativity - the act of coming up with an idea-is an inherently individual act. It is the development of an idea and its implementation where the team is needed.

Creativity has little to do with the 'flash of inspiration out of the blue'. To quote John Hunt, Visiting Professor for Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, "Creativity is not something where someone who has never worked in that field suddenly gets this marvellous idea. Creativity is relating a concept to a particular body of knowledge. The existing body of knowledge is as vital as the novel idea and really creative people spend years and years acquiring and refining their knowledge base - be it music, mathematics, arts, sculpture or design." There is often some debate as to whether creativity is for the selected few or everyone. Fortunately more and more people realise that everyone can be creative, just the type and level of creativity vary. Let me share a comment from a large US-based company that participated in the latest round of innovation best practice research (von Stamm, 2006) on how they used an invitation for ideas from everyone in the organisation to kick-start their innovation efforts. "What we learned from the inventory [of ideas] is the following, (1) the more people you invite the better the output, and the higher the achievements; (2) when we looked at where the best, most powerful ideas had come from we could not find any link to either a particular geographical area, nor to a particular level within the organisation's hierarchy, nor to one particular function. There were no hot spots for 'good ideas'. The ideas were rather distributed across all dimensions. The 'winners' had only one thing in common: they were all quite exceptional. So we were pleased we asked everyone, otherwise we would have missed out on some fantastic opportunities."

So while certain people are more creative on their own accord than others, creativity can be stimulated and supported through training, and by creating the right work environment and atmosphere. In her research Harvard Business School Professor Theresa Amabile identified certain characteristics that support creativity in the workplace (see Figure 1.1).

Amabile identified five environmental components that affect creativity:

Encouragement of creativity (which encompasses open information flow and support for new ideas at all levels of the organisation, from top management, through immediate supervisors, to work groups).

Autonomy or freedom (autonomy in the day-to-day conduct of work ; a sense of individual ownership of and control over work).

Resources (the materials, information and general resources available for work).

Pressures (including both positive challenge and negative workload pressure).

Organisational impediments to creativity (including conservatism and internal strife).

The components fall into two categories: they are either stimulants to creativity (tapped by scales assessing organisational and supervisory encouragement, work group support, sufficient resources and challenging work), or obstacles to creativity (tapped by scales assessing organisational impediments and workload pressure).

However, creativity cannot be ordered, it relies much more on intrinsic motivation, on people being enthusiastic, inspired and knowledgeable. You cannot tell people to be more creative and innovative, you have to inspire them to be so.

Finally, companies tend to require hard facts but creativity and innovation are often based on intuition. And, by the way, as early as the mid-1980s authors such as Peters and Waterman (In Search of Excellence) suggested that the modern American manager's overdependence on analytic thought and quantitative analysis was a principal cause for the loss of its worldwide pre-eminence (as reflected in stagnating productivity, ageing and obsolete machinery, and inferior but more expensive products).

So, implementation is about being organised and about using the methodological and systematic approach of a 'hare brain' (see Box 1.1). It needs to be structured and cannot be left to chance. Time is of the essence - you need to be fast. Creativity is less straightforward than implementation, it is not about a new process or establishing a new structure. To be creative people have to think differently. To be innovative people have to behave differently. And to be successful organisations have to employ people that think and behave differently. This is why I often define innovation as 'a frame of mind'. Creativity is about being different, thinking laterally, making new connections. It is about allowing the 'tortoise mind' to work. Creativity can be encouraged, not fforced. Time is of the essence too but in as much as creativity cannot be rushed, you need to allow it. Organisations that want to embrace innovation therefore need to find ways of reconciling the tension that lies in the juxtaposition of creativity and implementation.

To clarify, during the creative process intuition and thought are required - as they are for the implementation, analysis and action. However, each of the stages requires different skills and is successful under different conditions. This has been expressed in the model of 'cycling worlds' by creativity consultants Synectics, whereby I would read what they call the 'innovation cycle' to be the creative process and what they call the 'operational cycle' to be the implementation cycle (see Figure 1.2).

So, it is important to acknowledge that an organisation needs both: innovation and operation, and successful innovative organisations seem to manage to balance the tension between the two cycles without compromising either.

However, the verdict is still out on whether large organisations can be good at both continuous improvements and radical or even discontinuous innovation. There is a strong argument that incremental (or continuous) innovation and radical innovation are two different beasts that require different structures, processes and systems and I will come back to that in a little more detail in Chapter 21. Proponents of this view are Tushman and O'Reilly (1997, 2004) who argue that "The same organisation cannot successfully pursue various types of innovation. There are at least two types of innovation, and companies would be well advised to divide their organisations into two to pursue each type of innovation separately. The first type of innovation is incremental and should be practised by the portion of the organisation that is focused on execution. The second type of innovation is architectural or discontinuous, and should be attempted by a separate part of the organisation entirely dedicated to that more ambitious type of innovation. In the Ambidextrous Organisation model, the role of top management is to bring together both components of the organisation into a common vision of the firm and to put in place the management process that balances both agendas."

While there is generally agreement on the components of innovation, that is creativity and implementation, there is often disagreement about what deserves the title 'innovation'. Today it seems to be fashionable to call everything 'innovation', from the redesign of packaging to the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, basically everything that used to be called 'new product development' in the past. The literature is full of attempts to categorise different levels and types of innovation. One of the more useful and meaningful categorisations are the four categories suggested by Olson et al. (1995):

New-to-the-world products (products that are new both to the company developing them and to the marketplace using them).

Line extensions (products that are new to the marketplace but not to the company).

Me-too products (those that are new to the company but not to the marketplace).

Product modifications (existing products that have been simply modified, i.e. they are new neither to the company nor to the marketplace).

They are more meaningful than for example 'incremental and radical' as this always bears the question, from whose perspective? However, it is important to understand varying degrees of innovativeness from an organisation's perspective as different types of innovation need different conditions, processes and structures if they are to flourish. We will come back to that in Chapters 3 and 31.

As early as 1942 Schumpeter made some observations regarding different types of innovations, which he referred to as 'discontinuities'. The two types of discontinuity he identified are, first, a competence-destroying discontinuity, which renders obsolete the expertise required to master the technology that it replaces; and second, a competence-enhancing discontinuity, which builds on existing know-how embodied in the technology that it replaces.

'Competency-destroying innovation' - today more commonly referred to as 'disruptive innovation' - has gained much more attention over the past few years, not least driven by the work of Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. For a discourse and more insights around discontinuous innovation please refer to Chapter 31. A brief explanation of differences and definitions of different types of innovation is given in Box 1.2.

While building on Schumpeter, more recent literature, with minor variations, refers to four types of innovation. They are architectural innovation, market niche innovation, regular innovation and revolutionary innovation (Abernathy & Clark, 1985; Tidd, 1993).

Architectural innovation - innovation of this sort defines the basic configuration of product and process and establishes the technical and marketing agendas that will guide subsequent development.

Market niche innovation - innovation of this sort opens new market opportunities through the use of existing technology, the effect on production and technical systems being to conserve and strengthen established designs.

Regular innovation - innovation of this sort involves change that builds on established technical and production competence and that is applied to existing markets and customers. The effect of these changes is to entrench existing skills and resources.

Revolutionary innovation - innovation of this sort disrupts and renders established technical and production competence obsolete, yet is applied to existing markets and customers.

The categories of innovation seem closely related to the categories of design devised by Morley and Pugh (1987) and Slusher and Ebert (1992). Heany's (1983) categories of innovation (style change, product-line extension, product improvement, new product, start-up business, major innovation) are also similar to the different product categories introduced earlier. Heany provides a checklist for the categorisation of innovations, based on six different categories, which is shown in the Table 1.1.

Looking at Abernathy and Clark's definitions of innovation one could equate their first three categories with a competence-enhancing discontinuity and the fourth category, revolutionary innovation, with Schumpeter's a competence-destroying discontinuity.

A common categorisation of innovation is to differentiate between: (a) product innovation, the things an organisation offers and (b) process innovation, the ways in which they are created and delivered (e.g. Tidd et al., 2001). Combining levels of innovation with different categories we arrive at what I refer to as the 'innovation-scape' (see Box 1.3).

I have taken the liberty to provide examples, and added 'Business model' though it could be argued that some of this would be covered under 'Process'. As mentioned earlier, most organisations still focus on the bottom left corner: incremental product innovation. Here competition can generally come in quite easily and copy. To create a more sustainable competitive advantage an organisation can do two things: first to move towards the top right corner, but secondly to innovate a number of the fields of the innovation-scape. Apple's iPod is an example hereof. The iPod combines innovation of product - the iPod itself, service and process - the downloading of music, as well as the business model - how money is made out of it. Such a systemic innovation is much harder for any competitor to copy, giving the innovator a much longer lead to recoup the investment.

However, most of these categorisations tend to focus on the outcome, that is the product or service, but say little about the process, and the context which is necessary to enable innovation. An approach that focuses too strongly on process is not likely to succeed in creating a continuously innovative organisation. To achieve that, existing behaviours, beliefs and mental frameworks need to be understood and shifted. It is often our expertise and experience - the things that we know to be right and work - that prevent us from coming up with something truly new. Processes can support this shift, but on their own will not achieve it. That is why I define innovation as a frame of mind. Innovation is the art of making new connections, and continuously challenging the status quo - without changing things for change's sake.

CREATIVITY

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. Anthony Jay

In the previous section we have already talked about some characteristics of creativity. In this section we take a brief look at the origins of creativity, what kind of characteristics tend to be associated with creative people, the creative process, and some tools and techniques that encourage creativity.

(Continues...)


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"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Wiley
Publication date
2008
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0470510668
ISBN 13 
9780470510667
Binding
Paperback
Edition number
2
Number of pages
590

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9780470847084: Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity

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ISBN 10:  0470847085 ISBN 13:  9780470847084
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2003
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