Managing Innovation

Innovation is itself a name of comprehensive mechanism, full of multidisciplinary activities. It includes all the procedures involved in the process of invention as well as commercialization. Similarly its management is also a multidisciplinary task in which organizations tried to utilize their limited resources to achieve their desired objectives.

It gives organizations the sense to detect upcoming technology and makes them ready to adopt it and then adapt it by replacing the old one. It builds organization’s distinctive competence in a specific field of knowledge. It allows the organizations to leave that specific field of knowledge if it becomes redundant.

It plays a pivotal role in transforming inputs into outputs especially in form of ‘process innovation’ and ‘product innovation’. Organizations does innovate their products/services by using different levels of novelty i.e. minor, incremental and radical. They use innovation in their different departments like management, production, human resource and R&D for getting the benefits from its interdisciplinary characteristic.

It gives organizations the capability of recognizing upcoming technology, acquiring technology from outside sources, rationalize R&D, management of product development process from initial to final stage, identifying lessons for improvement in management routines, developing organization by putting the improved routines into effect, in structure, process, behaviour of an organization.

Beside all these, management of innovation comprises of four phases;

1. Signal processing
2. Strategy
3. Resorting
4. Implementation

1. Signal processing is the phase in which organizations consistently scans the market for upcoming technology and other relevant market information. When it detects some thing new then it collects the information and referred it to the second phase.

2. Strategy is the second phase in which collected information from first phase is being analyzed and plan is formulated by discussing possible actions, costs, benefits and priorities.

3. Resource is the third phase in which solutions are being formulated, in-house R&D is performed for invention. For this purpose procedures of external R&D, contracts and technology transfer are performed. Finally license is grated to organization.

4. Implementation is the final phase in which technical and relevant to the market development is performed. For product development this is external customer market and for process development this is internal user market. Finally product is launched and after-sales service is provided to the customer.

The above mentioned cycle is repeated by the organizations for learning and re-innovation. This shows the multifunctional characteristic of the innovation management.