Diffusion of Innovation

Answer 1

Managing innovation is an integral part to the organization's innovation process in sustaining organizational growth. After viewing the power point presentation on “Managing Innovation” in DOC SHARING WEEK ONE, post your response discussing how does managing innovation affect the relationship between the innovation process and organizational growth. Besides your initial posting, please respond to two other students' postings.

Innovation is a critical business competency of the 21st century. An innovation process is an essential tool that provides an organization with the perfect impetus to drive towards growth. However, managing innovation is as essential as it establishes a critical link between the innovation process and the long-term growth objectives of the organization (Henry & Mayle, 2002). Management of innovation is a practical and powerful tool that facilitates the selection and utilization of the best ideas (Drucker & Maciariello, 2008). It is essential for continuous improvement as well as a radical makeover of products, positioning and processes (O'Sullivan & Dooley, 2009). This is mainly why managing innovation affects the relationship between the innovation process and organizational growth.

The traits of an innovation culture provide managers with indicators for introducing and fostering change. Describe some of these traits and explain how they impact on sustaining organizational growth.

The traits of an innovation culture provide managers with critical indicators for introducing and fostering change. Some of these traits are mentioned below:

Experimentation

An organization that experiments continuously is able to invent new innovative products and services and this allows it to expand its existing market reach (Antonelli, 2003). Moreover, experimentation can also lead to the discovery of new innovative business processes that increase operational efficiency. These are just two of the many ways in which experimentation leads to organizational growth.

Reflection

This is another integral phase of the innovation culture and requires businesses to critically analyze its current and past performances in order to determine whether performance benchmarks have been achieved. Reflection allows businesses to identify shortcomings in performance and operations and encourages them to effectively remedy them, leading to organizational growth (Antonelli, 2003).

Barriers to innovation vary from industry to industry and from organization structure to organization structure. Identify these barriers and explain to what degree or ways they constrain innovation.

Barriers to innovation vary from one industry or organizational structure to another. The most common among these are:

A conservative leader who discourages innovative ideas and improvisation. This is detrimental to the long-term growth of a business as it discourages the introduction of creative ideas which help foster organizational growth (Henry & Mayle, 2002).

Apart from this, another critical barrier to innovation is time and resources (Drucker, 2005). This happens when employees are too busy fulfilling their responsibilities to be able to generate new ideas (Henry & Mayle, 2002).

In both cases, the barriers to innovation directly affect the capacity of the organization to invent new innovative ideas and come up with new products and processes. This could mean that the business sticks to obsolete ideas, products, processes and technologies where its major competitors have embraced newer and more innovative ideas and ...