Ideo - Knowledge and Innovation in Organizations

Question:

1. Discuss what factors might enable an organisation to innovate. What should an organization do, and how should it prepare itself to successfully innovate? In your discussion, reflect on how IDEO managed to innovate with crowdsourcing and what factors enabled its experimentation with OpenIDEO.

2. Discuss how organisations enable or hinder the management of knowledge in the context of innovation. In your discussion, analyse and reflect on how OpenIDEO and IDEO, which represent alternative organisational forms, compare and contrast in terms of accessing, sharing and creating knowledge for innovation

Knowledge and Innovation in Organizations

Introduction

Importance of innovation, its methods and supervision, has increased with the economy becoming more dynamic (Baregheh, Rowley, & Sambrook, 2009, p. 1334). Due to the ever-changing needs of the customers and emergence of life changing technologies, it is essential for organizations to innovate constantly. Innovation process is not just about coming up with novel ideas or inventions, it is also about implementing them and diffusing them more broadly (Sue Newell, 2009). There are a wide variety of definitions available for innovation based on the context but the one which resonates the most with me is –

“Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace.” (Anahita Baregheh, 2009)

Innovation often involves facilitating the formation of new mixtures of notions, resources and community interactions (Obstfeld, 2005). It involves connecting different people from a variety of backgrounds, orchestration of various technologies from diverse departments (Dougherty, 1992) and it can come from any part of the organization. Innovation is hard to sustain as it is a continuous and complex process.

Factors Aiding Innovation

One of the key factors which facilitates the innovation process is the encouragement of creative interactions throughout the organization. Hewlett implies that creativity has a direct correlation with the combination of inherent diversity and acquired diversity. The author tells that the traits which are acquired from experience are classified as acquired diversity while the demography of the workforce is considered as inherent diversity. The author argues that diversity unravels innovation by forming an atmosphere where radical or unconventional ideas are heeded. Companies with this kind of inherent and acquired diversity are 45% more expected to state that their organization’s share of the market grew over the year and they are 70% more expected to state that they seized a new market (Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 2013).