INNOVATION, DESIGN AND CREATIVITY

Innovation, Design and Creativity for a Competitive Advantage



Innovation, Design and Creativity for a Competitive Advantage

Introduction

Innovation is a business process of turning opportunity into new ideas and of putting these into widely used practice. In term of the nature, there are five major types of innovations: novelty, competence shifting, complexity, robust design and continuous improvement. While in term of the extent of change, innovations can be divided into incremental, radical and transformational models. Innovation deals with the change related to product, service and process, and the innovation management involves people, product, process and technology. This paper discusses the following questions with regard to innovation, design and creativity for a competitive advantage in a concise and comprehensive way.

Role of Incentives, Training & Education in Promoting Innovation

Incentives, training & education play remarkable role in promoting innovation in an organization. The innovation process argued by experts is first, scanning the environment to find the opportunities or threats; second, deciding what should be done responding to the environment; third, planning and obtaining resource to handle the change; last, implementing the innovation (Burton, 2000).

Creativity is the basics for innovation and it comes from incentives, training & education. Burton (2000) defines the creativity as "generation of ideas whereas innovation is about putting these into action". Two key elements of creativity are knowledge creation (KC), and ideas generation.

There is no widely accepted definition for KC, some definitions are described as following: "the ability to originate novel and useful idea"(Burton, 2000), and " when a firm acquires and adopts knowledge from others, it modifies knowledge to make it suitable"(Bhatt, 2000). The approach to KC is knowledge cognition, which is divided into distributed cognition and social constructionism.

A firm, to avoid the danger of reductionism by a single concept in knowledge creation, should adopt a multiple perspective approach to KC. Another reason for multiple concepts in KC is the diversity of knowledge types. There are also different descriptions to taxonomy of knowledge, a typical model created by Burton (2000) is: tacit, explicit, individual, collective, private, public, component and architectural.

The ideas generation process stated by Hickman and Silva (2001) is

1. identifying and collecting ideas;

2. screening and evaluating those ideas. Ideas screening must be vigorous, for the cost putting the ideas into the practice, and the low successful rate of the innovation, which from the ideas generation. The resources of ideas generation are customer needs, salespeople, competitors, market directions, technology development and company culture.

Leadership in Creating, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

Leadership does play a vital role in creating, managing, and sustaining innovation in an organization. Leadership is the catalyst and source of organizational creativity and innovation. In essence, for organizations to be able to achieve constant innovation (Hickman and Silva, 2001), leaders must establish an environment conducive to renewal and build organizational culture that encourages creativity and innovation. Organizational creativity also depends on how leaders encourage and manage diversity in the organization, as well as develop an effective leadership structure that sustains the innovation ...