INNOVATION AND CHANGE

A critical review of theories of innovation and change including the leadership of innovation and change



A critical review of theories of innovation and change including the leadership of innovation and change

Introduction

Innovation is an essential element for any organization in order to survive, grow and significantly influence the direction of any industry. Development does not; however, guarantee success, but most be followed up with successive streams of innovation and change, from the incremental to the radical. The most reliable way to be successful in the industry is to innovate better and longer than the competitor, leading companies develops innovation portfolios that they can use to help sustain growth over the long term (Uljin 2003: 19).

Innovation and change is an essential part of any business activity, but only some people recognize its importance and significance. Often, management fails to notice the implication of innovation and change, which becomes the reason of the change failure (Sutton 2001: 94).

There have been many researches and theories on innovation and change for leaders in business today. Leaders consider innovation and change as a crucial element to bring success in the business and yet they adopt an ongoing approach to the management, leadership, encouragement and required implementation of the successful change. Some of the theories based on innovation and change are discussed below (Uljin 2003: 19):

Innovation

Companies keep competing against each other using products and services, making competitive intelligence (CI) an important tool in the development of strategy in the organizations. The importance of competitive intelligence is attributed to its contribution to technological knowledge and intelligence, and it use for the analysis of information systems innovation in organizations. It should be pointed out early that innovation and technology are often taken in a similar light as asserted by Rogers (2003: p12) that 'we often use the word “innovation” and “technology” as synonyms.' And as such CI is primarily intended to be used for the state of the art, technological trends and challenges, with a strategic vision for competitiveness and customers (Ashton & Klavans, 1997; Fleisher & Bensoussan, 2003). Competitive intelligence; therefore, can be considered as a tool for the innovation process, observation of market, analysis of strategic behaviors of both competitors and customers, including their values, expectations and needs (Krücken-pereira et al., 2001). An innovation according to Rogers (2003: p12) will be considered as 'an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.' A unit of adoption in this case could be the organization, a society and a target market.

The new and improved techniques of doing things right at work is known as innovation (West et al 2003). Peter Drucker said, “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship... the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth (Drucker 1909).”

The above quotation is a well understood summary of how innovations are accepted in the work place. Former quotation is more likely to be applied in the financial and energy trading markets, where ...