Corporate entrepreneurship is an ever-growing concept that is flowing throughout many companies around the world. Some of which include Organic Valley and Ford. As each company continues to grow, they both allow their employees to be creative and innovative. This not only gives their employees the satisfaction of coming up with new ideas, but can allow each business to save time and money in the long run. In both Organic Valley and Ford, creativity plays a large role in the success of their companies. Some of the ways that they allow their employees to be innovative are providing the money and space to work on new or existing projects. In the last couple of years, both companies have taken action in giving employees what it takes to start the innovation process. With providing the resources they need, it makes it easier for employees to create new ideas and contribute to the company. This allows them to enhance their products and progress with bigger and better ideas. In return, it can not only move the company forward but make their customers happier as well. Before creating or enhancing a product, many employees will go through the creative process. The first part of the creative process is researching and gathering information about the aspects and development of a new product. This information will help the entrepreneur gain more knowledge and give them different perspectives on the problem. Next is the incubation process. During preparation, some individuals may get
| Thomas, in regards to the line you comment on "innovative changes often originate from lower levels of the organization", I totally agree withthat statement due to the fact that those lower level employees are the ones who are working in the fields, in terms of having their hands on the equipment and having the full knowledge of what improvements are needed in the work field. Innovation often derive from insight and even frustration at times. Good post.
It is known that when an organization is undergoing a significant change, the ability for employee’s innovation and creativity is also paramount to the organizational success. In fact, when attributed ethically and effectively innovation detracts alienation and inter-group hostility (West & Altink, 1996). Therefore, to assist the manufacturing
Google, Inc. is a corporation that is known for innovation and amazing leadership practices. Google’s greatest innovation may actually be its managerial practice. Google is not led by a single CEO, but by a team that gives it immense strategic and management strength. (Nussbaum, n.d.) Engineers at Google are able to work on their ongoing projects 4 days out of the 5 day work week, and one day a week is designated for potential ideas of their own choice. (Sawyer, 2009) Google has innovation reviews, where each executive presents the most promising ideas from within his own division. The CEO is at these innovation reviews to listen to these innovative ideas. Another way to ensure that some of these ideas have the opportunity to be developed is to allow the engineers to work on these ideas for more than one day a week and in some cases full time. Allowing time to be creative and develop ideas is embracing the art of innovation and
General Motors incorporates entrepreneurship and innovation into its business objectives. This is evident in General Motors Vision statement which states that its goal is to “lead in advanced technologies and quality by creating the world’s best vehicles”. (1) For instance General Motors has an extensive R & D, Design, and Engineering department that oversees the creativity, innovation, and invention of its strategic technologies and innovation programs which are aligned with its corporate vision. In order to lead in advanced technologies of the world’s best vehicles General Motors incorporates entrepreneurship and innovation concepts, which are essential to competing in the global market place.(2) In the spirit of entrepreneurship, which
- One who creates a new business in the face of risk and uncertainty for
Creativity has become a buzzword. It is often mixed and used interchangeably with innovation. Therefore, many corporate leaders, managers and ordinary employees associate creativity with something sophisticated and complex, requiring a lot of effort and knowledge, and, therefore, difficult to pursue. Although creativity is a critical building block of innovation, it is not the same. Moreover, it is not something that corporate leaders should ignore or be scared to encourage. In today’s world, where product centric approach is not sufficient for corporate success and progress, creativity in organizations is as important, including for profitability, as having adequate financial and capital resources. For that reason, the study of creativity
To integrate innovation at General Mills Canada, and ultimately increase sales, Brad Taylor needs to implement at least four changes. One solution is to set a mandatory time outside of the workday so that members of different departments can meet and share ideas, such as corporate sponsored events. According to Professors John Bessant and Joe Tidd, innovation tends to come from “bottom up team initiatives,” as seen from IBM’s success during Lou Gerstner’s tenure. , If low-level employees can associate, they can construct better ideas. A second solution to General Mills Canada’s problem is to “exploit their resources.” The idea is for employees to increase the efficiency of what they already do. They can increase innovation in this area by implementing new software to speed up any processes, or use the data from software to forecast demand and sales in a better way. , If they make their processes better than their competitors, they can gain a competitive advantage. A third solution is to create a balance between risk taking and stability. General Mills Canada must encourage employees to speak up in meetings when they have ideas or spot potential business opportunities. When upper level management encourages these initiatives, it will drive the employees’ risk aversion down and hopefully promote innovative thinking. Finally, General Mills Canada needs to increase the size of their prototype division.
Innovation research has addressed many areas: capacity for creativity; creativity at individual level; leadership style influences; and environmental influences. All these factors have significant impacts on creativity and innovation in
An entrepreneurship is the essence of capitalism, some people hate capitalism because of what it stands for and the effects it can cause to environment or the culture .But deep down inside, most want to be independent from working a job. Entrepreneurship is freedom to believe an create wealth, to be able to act on something, seeing as an opportunity , filling a need , while making money in the process .Problems are opportunities for the Entrepreneur .There are characteristics for entrepreneurs such as risk taker , freedom , independent ,leadership , organize , visionary and compulsive.
Creativity and design are important features of a well-developed knowledge economy, not only for having a favorable impact on people's well-being and business performance, but also on innovation (Hollanders & Cruysen, 2009). Creating an innovative organization requires more than understanding the design of an efficient development process (Stamm, 2003). Innovation deals more with and organizations or individuals ability to of creating and implementing a successful idea. This idea does not necessarily need to be creative. Sometimes a common sense solution, when implemented properly, can be the most efficient and effective organizational innovation. However, when
Positive approach to innovation is greater if employees know that they have the support of superiors and independence in action while they develop innovative ideas, as well as that they can make use of financial resources to support the innovation processes. As the relevant literature shows, objectives may actually promote innovation at the same time leaders of the organization should give a clear signal that innovation is highly desirable, by setting ambitious goals indifferent areas and establishing motivated teams to find ways to implement the vision.[14]
Another important factor in how organisations can develop their innovation management capabilities is the work environment for employees following recruitment. Referring back to Google, they name their employees Googlers increasing the sense of inclusion and belongingness to the organisation which can only be met with a positive response from employees (to lead to more creative work, and hence innovation), due to the fact they are better motivated to do well for their peers and are enjoying work life. As Amabile (1996) states, ‘you will get the most creative work from people who are feeling happy and have positive thoughts, and on days when they have the most intrinsic motivation.’
The spokesperson said that there are two major aspects that drive innovation in an organization. They were Emerging Market, Peer-Competition. I agree to him, but I also would like to add one other important aspect to the list i.e. Encourage Creative Thinking within the organization. It is because of the continuously evolving Market and consumer requirements, organizations are forced to innovate. Creativity is exploring the capability of one’s mind and to bring about new ideas which eventually leads to an innovation. This is the case with companies like Microsoft that introduced Windows 7 and Apple that introduced iPod. Apple and Windows encourages employees to be creative, collects ideas, and tries to implement those ideas into innovation as and when possible.
While creativity leads to the production of new and useful ideas in any domain, innovation is the successful implementation of those creative ideas within an organization (McLean, as cited in Zhou, Zhang & Montoro-Sanchez 2011). In highly dynamic business environments, innovation and creativity have become crucial for creating competitive advantages for the firm. People are the most vital resource of an innovative organization, and all innovation-based firms, in order to succeed, have to learn how to manage, motivate and reward their people (Gupta and Singhal, as cited in Zhou, Zhang & Montoro-Sanchez 2011).
Historically, most executives referred to innovation primarily with the development of new technologies or products. However, innovation is increasingly seen as the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans, distribution channels, or management practices. There is a greater recognition that great ideas can transform any part of the value chain and those products and services represent just a small segment of innovation. This broadening of focus has implications for those who are responsible to innovate. It used to be just a selected group of employees, usually within R&D: engineers, designers, or scientists, whose job was to generate and pursue new ideas. Nowadays, organizations are trying to induce an innovative culture across the hierarchy to achieve holistic transformations. Making innovation everyone’s business sounds intuitively appealing but is hard to implement. Employees face capacity issues, time constraints, and motivation issues that restrain them. There is often a lack of consistent follow-through of well-intentioned schemes. Additionally, there is typically some level of disconnection between the priorities of senior management and the efforts of those lower down in the organization. This becomes more evident in large corporations where established processes are already in place and leave very little room to innovate.