Innovation and change
| Innovation and change |
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| See also |
Innovation and change are important tightly integrated aspects of organizational development. Change involves active shaping the future of the company, consisting of developing and maintaining the relationship between the objectives and resources and the needs of the market. This development would not be possible without innovation and R&D activities to create new competitive products and services.
Every innovation implies some change in the company: change in technology, processes, people, competencies, skills, management techniques, etc. Disruptive innovation requires disruptive change in the form of re-engineering or restructuring of whole company to adapt do new circumstances in the environment or internal processes.
Innovation
An innovation must not be a routine change, it have to aimed at producing benefit to the organization and the wider society. "An innovation must be public in its effects. If an individual introduces a change to his or her work which has no discernible impact on, or implications for, other people in the organization, it would not be considered an innovation" [1].
It's hard to identify innovation as a separate area within organizational change research but it's harder still to characterize the of organizational change. The term 'change' is so wide that it may be taken to embrace nearly every topic [2].
Changes and innovation in organization
Many scientists have try explain how and why organizations change and innovate. Change is at the heart of such important organizational occurrence as:
"To understand organizational change is to understand organizations as we experience them, and to explain organizational change is to articulate what makes organizations what they are and to suggest how we may shape and re- shape them"[3]. Innovation is an valid partner to change. Innovation is the source of social and economic progress and a product and a facilitator of the free exchange of ideas. It is shown in:
- new products
- new production processes,
- advances i communications technology,
- new organizations and services n the public and nonprofit sectors
Change can take a lot of many forms, it may be:
- planned or unplanned,
- incremental or radical,
- recurrent or unprecedented.
In over time we can be observed tendency in process or sequence of changes. These trends can be speed up or decelerating in time, and they may move toward cquilibrium, chaos, or randomness in the behavior of the organizational entity being examined. Concept of organization change involves three areas:
- difference
- at different temporal moments
- between states of an organizational unit or system
"organizational change generally indicates a macro-level approach, which is more concerned with the organization as a whole and its major subsystems than with the experiences of small work groups and individuals. Similarly, the focus is very much on large-scale changes, whereas innovation research sometimes concerns itself with changes which are quite localized in their impact within an organization"[4].
References
- Greve H. R. (2003). Organizational learning from performance feedback: A behavioral perspective on innovation and change. Cambridge University Press.
- Henry J., Mayle D. (2002), 'Managing innovation and change', Sage.
- Hekkert M. P., Suurs, R. A., Negro, S. O., Kuhlmann, S., & Smits, R. E. (2007). Functions of innovation systems: A new approach for analysing technological change. Technological forecasting and social change, 74(4), 413-432.
- Poole M.S., Van de Ven A.H. (2004), ‘’Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation’’, Oxford University Press
Footnotes
Author: Agnieszka Pytel
