Creativity and Innovation Worksheet

Cracker Jack is one of the most recognized consumer food brands in the United States. The brand possesses virtually universal awareness, holding steady at 97 percent among persons between the ages of 15 and 60. It also has an enviable 95 percent brand name awareness among heavy users of caramel popcorn. In spite of this gold mine, it is still regarded as traditional, stale, old fashioned, a product from a bygone era and less hip and less contemporary than its major rival, Crunch ‘n Munch. To add to this dilemma, the product diversification strategy that led to the development of several other versions such as Cracker Jack Fat Free, Butter Toffee, and Nutty Deluxe, in the hopes of

The company's products, to me, appear to fall in the areo of Product Maturity. Basically because the products that are made and sold are not new; however, because the items are already baked and packaged, they offer convenience to customers who do not have the time to mix ingredients and bake it themselves. Also, for thos who have no cooking skills, it offers and easy way to acquire the snacks.

Who changes our beliefs and behavior the most when we are in a difficult situation? The book "They Cage the Animals at Night" is written by Jennings Michael Burch is autobiography about a little boy who didn't lived a good life, and spent most of his life in a orphanage. He was luckily two have people who were there to influence and help him. Stevie, Sal, and Doggie were people Jennings knew during this time that influenced him the most. Stevie influences Jennings two ways.

In the nineties Juicy Fruit was a struggling brand. It was failing to keep the rhythm with sugar-free products that were promising breath freshness, intense mint flavour, a sexier new format and a larger pack. Excel and Dentyne Ice had become market leaders, with always new flavours and by heavily spending on advertisement. Both were growing fast. Juicy Fruit was a boring and old-fashioned sugar stick with a flavour that didn’t last enough. In 1992 it had launched a sugar-free tab with the TV support. In 1998, it had launched the “Value Price Proposition”. It was

Frito-Lay first toyed with multigrain snack chips in the 1970s, when research indicated a need for a snack in this category. Prontos, released in 1974 and distributed for four years, weren’t incredibly well received. While a lack of success is attributed to a confusing name, poor manufacturing and too narrow a market, Dwight Riskey, VP of Marketing Research and New Business, admits that he is “not sure there were dramatic things wrong with the product design [...]. It may have been invented and introduced before its time.” This sentiment was reflected in the Harvest Project in the early 1980s, when Frito-Lay developed several multigrain products to attempt and have a possible healthy alternative to saltier snack foods for the baby-boomer generation. Lackluster response caused the project to stall into the mid 80s as focus was put on developing new flavors and healthier alternatives in other brands.

Brand building, consumer health and wellness, and advertising and promotions were all critical to success in the industry. Kraft’s ability to compete with lower priced snacks showed its ability to differentiate itself from other lower priced competitors.

Snacks and grocery are driven from different business and distribution models.  The snacks business provides rather optimistic numbers for market growth but its distribution model is more focused to the higher touch and direct to store needs of convenience stores and smaller retail.  Snack food consumers are impulse buyers, with promotions, market timing and inventory strategies that require considerable sophistication and proper timing (Ferrari, 2011).

Innovation is a term I’ve frequently heard in the realm of business and technology implying new and or different methods leading to

Innovation comes from a variety of sources. For example when there are development teams within a company the use innovative ideas to enhance existing products or produce new ones. Innovations are brought about through the creative thoughts of employees, customers, and competitors.

Tidd et al (2000) states, “the innovation is a business process of revolving 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

For most companies, identifying what a learning organization should be and actually becoming one is tricky at best, impossible at worst. One way that manager's and companies can promote the concept of being a learning organization is to assess whether the company is in need of a short-term fix or whether it is more focused on long-term results. Organizational learning is a long-term activity that will build competitive advantage over time and requires sustained management attention, commitment, and effort. Learning organizations maximize their competitive positions during strong economic times and they prudently train their employees and prepare for change even in turbulent times. As a result, learning organizations and learning

Organizations that strive to excel in aspects of innovation, competitiveness, and performance must have clearly defined core values that are executed by specific learning disciplines (Senge, 2010). Giesecke and McNeil (2004) stated, "A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights" (p. 55). In the pursuit of defining specific practices that would produce an ideal learning organization, Senge (2008) proposes five disciplines that include, "...systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared vision, and dialogue" (p. 1). In this application paper I will analyze each of the five disciplines discussed by Senge (2008) and discuss how they can be applied in an organization such as the high school where I am currently teaching to address specific areas in need of improvement.

According to Von stamm (2008), innovation has always been regarded as the key to success. Innovation is the process of turning new knowledge into new products and services. Innovation is

Radical innovation should present a new product, service, practice or solution that significantly differs from previous experience. It usually comes with higher risks as there is no prior knowledge and competences are low (Schilling, 2011:vi). Introducing of a third generation (3G) telephony could be a good illustration of a radical innovation. 3G was launched with an increased bandwidth that could not only transmit a voice, but support more diverse multimedia applications (http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com). To switch from 2G to 3G the telecommunication service required significant investment in development of relevant equipment and infrastructure, such as larger device display, memory and battery capacity, etc. Besides, it was not quite clear how would customers react to this innovation. So, companies and their managers, had to evaluate different risks simultaneously, including technical achievability, reliability, costs, and demand.

Peter Senge argues that not only we humans learn, but organizations also. However, learning itself may not be enough for the organization to survive in this ever-challenging era. In his book, The Fifth Discipline, Senge introduced five ‘disciplines’, namely systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning, that characterizes an organization as a learning organization.