Topic 2: Fostering innovation in organisations
Introduction
The global business environment is characterised by rapidly changing requirements that are increasing intricacy of doing business and rising the level of competitiveness (Hernaus, 2011). The managing and innovation become increasingly arduous as intricacy increases (Decision Innovation, 2017). Maintaining a current situation is no longer an option, on the contrary, the organisational ability to change has become an essential thing. In order to take advantage of those that might benefit the organisations, management should be aware of the major trends in international businesses. Organisations can take advantage by changing the environment to create a niche for the company as the international markets are broadening speedily. Therefore, innovation is one of the trends that organisation should be aware of (Markgraf, 2018). Besides, business innovation has been linked to overall growth and technological advancements in an assortment of industries. This is partly because the tangible that how innovation change a company operates internally as well as how it interacts externally with customers and other businesses.
In order to create a context which would stimulate the envelopment of both theory and practice, an in-depth theoretical research will be conducted. This report aims to use contemporary examples of business practice from the research, together with analytical models, conceptual frames and management theory from three topics which are organisation culture, leadership, and diversity.
This report can be divided into four-part. Firstly, this report will discuss the importance of innovation in this contemporary business environment. Second is provides specific examples of innovation bringing change and success to organisation simultaneously discuss how the organisation conducts innovation and links to three topics. Moreover, also discuss the challenges will face by organisation when conduct innovation. Next, it will analyze and discuss the research methods conduct within this report. The last area is talking about the methods on how organisation can do to manage the innovation and change effectively.
Importance of innovation
In this frequently changing world today, change and innovation play an extremely important role within any organization (Shukla, 2017). Innovation is important to organisations today as doing this will ensure employees develop the creative confidence thus to has the ability to come out with creative ideas and the courage to try it out at the same time conspire to influence the desired changes in the world around them (Imaginenation, 2016). Besides that, according to Micro-Touch & Consult (2012) quoted Boak, who wrote in 2010, innovation entails changes, but not every change involves innovation. Not every time the company is managing change is dealing with innovation, so innovation and change are quite often used improperly. Whereas change deals with things known to the organisations and is about applying existing knowledge; however, innovation deals with the unknown and is about probing new ways to make organisations profitable (Nagesser, 2014). So, as mentioned earlier, every innovation requires the company to change in order to transit from the previous situation to the new one, but not every change involves something innovative. In this section will discuss the relationship between innovation and change and organisation culture, leadership, and diversity and how its effect each other.
Example of organisation innovation
Google Inc
Google is known for sustainably creating new products and entering new industry. From the beginning with only has the searching engine until today has many other services such as develops the web application like Gmail, Google calendar, Google maps and Google docs to help the people to share information and communicate more readily (BBC News, 2016). Google has conducted much innovation to improve their organisation.
Google has a good innovation on their organisation culture which called 70/20/10 system (Hardy, 2011). This system was a principle that everyone should spend 70% of their time on their core job, 20% of each day to new projects or ideas related to core projects, and 10% to any new ideas they want to pursue regardless of what they might be (Bridges, 2015). As programmers, salesman, and even managers are obtained enough space to be creative therefore Google credits this rule with being the driving force behind new products and new ideas. It is hard to readily manage the flow of new projects and ideas when the scale of organisation become too large, Google instituted a schedule of meetings between employees and management. Within these meetings, employees can present new projects and ideas directly to the management (Thompson, 2018). Actually, leadership has a great influence on the culture of the company, and Google is not an exception. The successful innovation of organisational culture of Google was inseparable with its leadership style.Within organizational culture context of Google, employees feel free to provide their ideas and opinions as their managers support their employees to share their ideas with each other, including CEO Larry Page. Innovation is the core of Google. Every employee is conditioned to dedicate innovative ideas. In this organizational culture, Google also tends to smart employees who struggle for preeminence people. Thus, organisational culture of Google by sharing of ideas and capability to rapidly respond to the market to supports excellence in innovation. It shows that leadership of Google plays an excellent role to supports its employees. Google was applied theory Y when they manage the company (UKEssays, 2015). Google performs this theory due to their tasks incline to more flexible and innovative. Managers who use this method trust their employees to take ownership of their work and do it effectively by themselves (Mulder, 2015). For example, Google is using this theory as their leadership style and less inspect their employees. The leaders of Google concerned more about the demands and abilities of each individual, the study of the nature of human being, an appreciation their employees as their customers (Tran, 2017). At Google, it is real that they focus on the workplace brings the comfort to staff creatively and freely (Lebowitz and Breene, 2013). So the leadership of Google is playing an excellent role when implementing innovation.
Google is a worldwide company that has strong practices in diversity. In fact, Google focuses the workforce diversity in its company because of the reason that Google has over 70 offices in more than 40 countries and its customer base is so diverse. This is because they need to support and fit in the need of the diverse customer base. The workforce diversity increases creativity within the company because complex groups are generating different and unique ideas with the Google. As more diverse ideas are suggested, the chances of finding a workable answer are improved. Moreover, the diversity in viewpoint also is the advantages. This is because Google hired the employees came from different culture or generation which will help the organisation to get the diverse viewpoint from the employees. It creates the competitive advantages amongst competitors.
Google was well done on developing its web application, yet, according to Forrest (2015) quote Boris Metodiev, who said in an interview, even Google launched Android for Work with a long list of partners, many organisations, especially government organisations tend to use IOS, with Window, or with Blackberry rather than Android as they think that Android operating system is not secure enough. So Google needs more improvement even innovation in its program to gain the trust of the organisations.
NIKE
Like-minded of top management and teams can operate rapidly, yet it lacks diversity of opinions, ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds lead to cannot always get the best results. Organisations may be missing out on innovation, creative ideas, and profitability because they are combined with people who think similar (Grillo, 2014). According to a McKinsey & Co report, US public organisations with diversity on their top management team have a higher return on equity than those without (Barta, Kleiner and Neumann, 2012).
According to Schiller (2018), diversity helps organisations to become more innovative and more successful. The most representative example is NIKE. Fostering diversity of employees is a key factor in boosting innovation within organisations. Yet, diversity creates a better understanding of the customer base as it takes a broad spectrum of diverse minds, cultures, and experiences to effectively connect with different audiences. Thence, the diverse culture of Nike was inseparable with its organisational culture.
According to the Business Wire (2016) stated that Nike was released its FY14/15 Sustainable Business Report, the CEO of Nike indicates that, at Nike, he believes that diversity boosts innovation and creativity. Nike emphasis the distinct experiences and backgrounds employee brings and wants all who are joined to excite their full potential. As different perspectives can provide the excellent ideas, Nike is committed to a workplace that is increasingly diverse and inclusive (Nike Inc, 2018). Therefore, the organizational culture of Nike supports organization tolerance and capability. With consideration of relations of Nike with customers and other employees, employees of Nike are given a set of instruction, rules, and expectation on how to complete their jobs (Young, 2017). This method assures that the Nike maintains its organisation culture and inclusive diversity, which partly helpful to the success of the business.
Nike has an employee network called NikeUNITED, which is a collection of employee resource groups that stand for the diversity of the employees (Nike Inc, 2018). These networks serve to deliver career development experiences, increase cultural awareness and illustrate the commitment of Nike to diversity and inclusion in the communities where they live and work. NIKE has eight employee-formed and managed communities. Nike was performed well when they are maintaining their organisational culture and managing their diverse workforce as well as utilise diversity to improve problem-solving and drive innovation.
Even though Nike has conducted much innovation within organisation and its products, however, it also faced the challenge in the marketplace. In the beginning, Nike was start up their business with only sold footwear, over time, Nike started to innovate on their products become more varied products in the marketplace. So it came out the problem in the industry. Nike has long been viewed as immune to compete of the apparel industry, but the sectors still slumping and most of the consumers unwilling to spend money on apparel (Schlossberg, 2016). Therefore, Nike faces the challenge which needs to innovate its products to attract customers to purchase its products.
Research Methods Used
Different types of research can be conducted liberty by researchers according to the purpose of the study (Research Methodology, 2017). Within this essay, it was conducted qualitative research method. The results of qualitative research are not predictive, but descriptive. Qualitative data is information about qualities; people cannot count it (What Works, 2015). In another word, it is information about how people feel about something. One of the reasons to conducted qualitative research method within this report is because it is specifically designed to exposing the behaviour of target audience its connection to a specific topic or issue. It is very useful than quantitative research method when conducting research and analyses the result of innovation in organisations. It can describe objectively on the view of the importance of fostering innovation in an organisation at the same time helps to discover new thoughts and individual views (JustPaste.it, 2015).
The type of research that is conducted is descriptive with the aim to understand the features of theories about the fostering innovation and relationship between globalisation, organisation culture and leadership (Eijk, 2010). The concrete method is a literature review. Through the reading of many articles by different authors on innovation and the three topics, a better view of the topics is given. The data collection of the research is secondary sources. The data that is collected is found on websites. The following examples of key-words where used to find interesting articles: Fostering innovation, Innovation and change, Organisation culture, Leadership, Diversity, Managing innovation, Challenges of innovation, and Impacts of innovation.
Methods to manage innovation
There are several ways that organisations can do to conduct and manage innovation effectively. Firstly, maintain an open dialogue between employees and top management, communicate the changes around the innovation in the frame of reference of the targets, with feedback loops built in so that organisation can collect data back from the employees (Colgate, 2010). Secondly, empower and engage employees by encouraging them to share creative ideas (Burgess, 2016). Top management should encourage employees to continue sharing their ideas and each other. Discover the most effective way of communication for the organisation and without limit creativity to special occasions. The most important is developing a reinforcement strategy (Alsher, 2017). There are positive consequences for those that demonstrate they are in the new ways and negative consequences for those that continue to work in the old ways. These reinforcements must be meaningful for the goals and applied with directness and affirmative.
Conclusion
In this essay, it underlines two points. Firstly, it is important to an organisation to conduct innovation whether on products and services area or within the organisation structure. Secondly, how the organisation culture, leadership and diversity workforce bring influence when organisation conducting innovation.
To sum this all up, fostering innovation in organisation bring a lot of benefits, even though there might some challenges and problems will come behind innovation, however, the benefits outweigh than disadvantages. As customers always think innovation as something that will add value to an organisation or product, therefore, more and more organisations acquainting importance of fostering innovation in business, which might helps organisation flourish amongst the competition. Compared from simply sharing or copying ideas or approaches from competitors, the advantages of an innovative organisation, right by from start-up, growth and development can far surmount any benefits like creative competitive advantage and establish the best way for organisation (Innovation X Change, 2018).
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Assignment 2
Introduction
A reflection is a significant part of the learning process after the assignment. According to George Rosier (2002), Reflection has been used successfully to improve student learning by requiring students to write a reflective report after the class discussion or an assignment.
The purpose of composing this reflective report is to reflect on my research and analytical skills and what I have learned from this module. I will write a short reflective report regarding on the challenges that I have faced when working on this assignment and how I have handled them effectively in the following essay. Besides that, I will also reflect on what I have learnt from Contemporary in Business and Management as well as suggest myself on how I can improve my capabilities.
Description and development of skills
My previous level of research and analytical skills are quite poor. As I always did a lot of wrong research during I was doing my assignment, it was really waste my time on doing wrong research. Moreover, my analytically was poor than my research skill. I cannot analyse my research properly and it leads me to lose a lot of marks on this.
However, after study this module; I learnt how to doing research properly especially after I studying the learning set which related to our topics. I can find some useful research since I read the article related to the topic during learning conversation. Therefore, I saved a lot of time when I was doing this assignment as well as I can find a lot of useful data. The learning set is really useful as I let me understanding which kind of the article is really related and useful to the topics I have chosen. And it helps a lot on my assignment. Yet, my analytical skill has not a big improvement as sometimes I cannot really analyse what is really needed and what does the data mean to me. So I always lose mark on the part.
Changes in attitudes and understanding
I had developed some personal skills after studying this module. First of all, critical thinking is one of the important skills that I have developed. According to Alison Doyle (2018), most of the employers want their employees to be creative thinking and thoughtful analysis when solving problems. Within this assignment, as I was applied critical thinking so I was created some creative ideas and views which make me can successfully link all my chosen topics together thus to make it more natural to be related. Second personal skill is the ability to accept constructive feedback. When doing this assignment, I was always getting feedback from my friends and we always share our opinions together. At the time I let tutor checked my assignment; I faced challenges as he was asking me to restructure my work. There is many of things need to change and I had time-limited, however, I still accept his feedback to restructure my work again as I know he was giving me good suggestion. In this situation, I also developed another skill which is coping with pressure. The pressure that I was coping is time pressure as the submission due is closely but I still need to restructure my work.
Students will have lesser opportunities for learning proficiently if they had not positive attitudes and perceptions (Marzano, 2018). In my opinion, I think that positive attitude on learning is really important; not only for students but also for all people as there is no any limit when learning. According to Government of Alberta (2018), positive attitude on learning lets people feel relax, remember, focus, and assimilate information when learning. Therefore, I always keep myself in a positive attitude when learning.
Plans for the futures and conclusion
Look back on my experience of studying on this module, at first, when we discuss three articles about the ‘learning conversation’ we faced the problem with time management and lack of communication within the team. So we had some obstructs when we conducted the ‘learning conversation’. At that time, I realised that we really need a leader to lead us as leadership is a significant element of management which helps to maximise efficiency and to achieve goals (Juneja, 2018).
After this module, I learnt some employability skills such as leadership, self-innovation, teamwork, communication skill and time management. It might very useful once I am employment. It will increase my strength and opportunity for employment in my future.
