Designing the Effective Innovation
Resourcing Unit in the Agile Organization.
Frederic Kwesi Great Agboletey
Tallstigen 10, 1 tr.
186 70 Brottby
Sweden.
Abstract
The article
condenses observations made in researching Organizational Adaptation and Coping
Strategies in Turbulent Environments together with emergent views in Innovation
Groups in fast paced organizations to synthesis an original paper on designing
an effective Innovation Idea Resourcing Units in an organization. The paper
briefly examines what an innovation resource unit does, how it should operate
to attain its goals and how it should relate with other organizational system
units. The organizational unit is here defined as a defined operational entity
in the organization. The paper concludes by asserting the potential for
breakthrough product development by tapping into latent creative pools of
untapped knowledge that the Innovation Coordinating Group, properly managed can
enable an organization in a competitive product or technology market.
Key
Words: Innovation Coordinating Group/Units. Coordinating Function. Flexible.
Adaptive Response.
Organizations
in these times are in a challenging environment of rapid product innovativeness
and require a quick response set in management strategies to respond
effectively to developments in their technological environment, by seeking to
resource for ideas within their organization and from without, seeking to put
in place organizational structures that are able to identify innovative product
ideas and have in place the machinery for developing those ideas into products.
One
way the organizations can become effective at innovativeness is through the
formation and effective of an Organization's own Innovative
Department/Team/Group/Unit that will coordinate idea harnessing efforts and
channel them into product development. The present paper, takes a look at how
to set and employ such an innovation group in an organization.
An
Organizational Innovation Coordination Group (OICG -hitherto-) comes into management
consideration based on three fundamental basis that gird organizational
research in organizational innovation. These are that:-
1. Organizations exist in a competitive
environment, where the advantages of successful product development, gives the
product developer a leading edge in its market, if strategically managed into
full market awareness. Thus OICG becomes an instrument for identifying idea
worthy of development to push an organization's existing product range into
newer fields.
2.
An Organizational Innovation Coordinating Group (OICG) serves as a human fusion
point, operating above and beyond research and Development, coordinating its
activities with research and development, to ensure that an organization's
existing technology and strategies under implementation are responsively
adaptive to the pressures of its product environment and flexibly designed to
source for ideas for development consideration from unlimited organizational
vistas, both from within and from without. The OICG must coordinate ideas
through R&D through to production and test marketing, being the supervisory
body that follows an idea through to its test marketing; over and above all
existing organizational bodies, working with and not competition with any
organizational department, because of its unique constitution within the
organization's strategic framework and implementation, as a progressive
constituent body intent on putting the organization through innovative product
development on a higher level.
3
This implies of course, that the OICG is a boundary spanning constituent body,
engaging in cross organizational idea resourcing and working to enable fused
implementation processing of ideas considered as worthy of developing.
The
organic characteristic of the organization, implies that product development is
not altogether unrelated to adaptations in terms of changing work
characteristics that will enhance the quality of employee working environment.
Thus such ideas that will improve he existing state of working environment must
be considered alongside the purely technologically related issue of product
innovation. In which case the situational innovation of work practices is a
partial consideration of the OICG. Technological changes in production and
production methods, needless to say at time does imply a change in man-machine
interfaces and how such ergonomic and work organisation issues to ensure the
social consequences of task organization also fit into the frame of concern of
the OICG.
Now
that the considerations leading to the formation of the OICG have been
elaborated. What is an OICG?
Basically,
the OICG is a group formed within an organization to resource for ideas
organization wide to ensure that the organization as a productive entity can
identify ideas worthy of developing to ensure that the organization can improve
on existing range of products in order to ensure that the organization stays in
a lead position in its product market. It is also to ensure a means for
articulating worthy ideas for implementing to improve upon existing work
practices and employee relation to the organization as the organization
identifies ideas for product development among its workforce.
The
OICG is more a less a unit within the organization set up to "seek for
ideas by any means, from anyone, to improve, add value to and push product
development beyond existing attained levels."
By
its nature such a group must have:-
1.
A high CREATIVITY IDENTIFICATION orientation as its core value,
2.
Must be highly interested in TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS in organizational's
operative area of interest. Be it in its market, competitors efforts,
development's emerging from research institutions and laboratories etc
3.
Attentive consideration to CUSTOMER complaints, suggestions for improvements and
dislikes are equally of great importance.
4. Be able to develop IDEA NETTING throughout an
organization by making it easy for idea transfer to a source of implementation
consideration and rewarding ideas turned into products.
5.
Considering that emergent ideas are fluidity hat must be congealed to fit into
the organization's existing productive framework through development of idea
through a series of processes and technological and machinery modification, as
the need may be to generate the idea product, the OICG must be formed as an
organic structured team of varied background constituents capable of examining
an idea from a variety of perspectives and examine its practical relevance to
organization's bottom line of profit generation, either from the short or long
term perspective. It is to be noted however, that fast product innovation in
the external product environment gives credence to short rather than long term
perspectives.
6.
As has been noted by researchers in the field of Organizational Innovation,
such a group must have a "multi-disciplinary orientation and nurture a
multi-disciplinary setting where competencies in the field of business,
technology and general way of work are communicated and mixed".
The
functional relevance upon which such OICG are maintained and supported by the
organization is simply that, they identify ideas from just about any source -
with practical relevance given to ideas emerging from within the workforce,
customers or just inspiration -, conceptualise these ideas into structured
formats for task forms for transactional initiation through idea
implementation. Which idea implementation is itself a series of processes that
culminate in a product being developed and trial marketed.
In
this sense, catching ideas, analysing such ideas, evaluating and evaluating
such ideas and giving priority for implementation for those considered worthy
of further consideration as products to be developed.
The
OICG must be capable by its constitution of deriving business driven strategic
decisions by analysing overall organization technology strategy and be able to
stimulate the creation of new business opportunities, products and ways to
work.
When
an organization's management decides to institute an OICG, there is a need for
taking into consideration tangential changes in excising organizational
management practices which should enable effective communication of ideas
through appropriate organizational channels and directly to the OICG, to
enhance its idea netting activities. The organization as a whole and the OICG
must be able to identify trend, product innovations and changes both internally
to a division and the organization as a whole.
The
effective OICG must be "an absorbent sponge" open to receive ideas
and configuring itself to situational
mediations within internal formative nature and external interaction with other
organizational units to internally enable effective idea analysis and
implementation path projection definition as a plan to be followed, and
externally to be able to negotiate to interest and persuade the various
organizational departments needed to bring "an idea nucleus" to
product developed and marker tested.
As
an aside an effective OICG must be constituted with the "right mix"
of member constituents, with the required educational, training and positional
background (positional if an organization decides to derive the OICG from among
its existing employees rather than forming a completely new department or
organizational subunit to be OICG. The
OICG must have the right blend of personalities, capable by composition of
multidimensional thinking and idea analysis through all its projected process
steps and in so doing be able to generate a whole out its individual
constituency that is distinctively group identifiable, rather than individual
dependent.
In
OPERATIONAL TERMS, the nature of function of the OICG, is of the nature such
that:-
Once
an IDEA has been identified and discursively analysed as worthy of further
attention by the OICG for organizational interest on the basis of business
potential and technological possibilities of implementation.
1.
The idea thus recognised must be ratified by the R&D; that unit in the
organization responsible for implementing innovation.
2.
At R&D, the idea must go through prototyping or modelling, where the idea
will still be under consideration for rejection or acceptance for
implementation.
3.
If the idea is accepted at stage 2. consideration, then it must proceed to
production for trial products to be developed out of the models and
4.
Trial products must then be released for trial marketing by the marketing/sales
(for smaller organizations), where consumers will independently pass their
judgements on the product.
5.
The OICG must be able to monitor the idea in gestational development and
implementation through the various subsystems and departments of the
organization until the consumer responses can be obtained for process success,
failure or further adaptation consideration.
The
OICG as an analytical constituent of far reaching analysts, is confirmed by the
fact that the actual product is through a series of processes realised within
different organizational subsystem, yet the relevance of the OICG is determined
by the number of "hits" obtained in successful product developed and
profitably sold. Thus right from the acquisition of an idea, the OICG must be
able to analytical determine what the likely problems and obstacles that a good
idea may face within the unique consideration of the organization under
consideration and how solutions can be evolved to respond to subsystem emergent
weaknesses and obstacles all the way to effective marketing strategies, which
the marketing department must be "sold-on" to the marketing proposal
from the OICG. In which sense one must in conception ensure an identifiable
unit that can blend in harmoniously with all the "political" decision
influencing units within any organizational system.
Management
must ensure that ideas emerging from the OICG must be accepted as strategically
important to organization success and their access to the organization and its
subsystems must be supported through idea integration at critical organization
nexuses throughout the process developing from raw idea to finished product.
Financial
resources to support idea resourcing, development and product testing may not
take away from organizational subsystems budgetary allocation but must come
from a direct resource allocation
facilitated
to the OICG.
In
conclusion, an idea that is identified by the OICG may (a) add value to an
existing attained level of product technology or (b) lead to a total
breakthrough over, beyond and above anything hitherto available in the product
environment of the product-idea or idea-product under consideration.
References:-
Agboletey
K. (2000) Organizational Adaptation and Change in Turbulent Environments.
Unpublished Doctorate Thesis, Submitted to Institute of Behavioural Studies of
Linköpings University, Sweden.
Hellström
et. al (2002) Guiding Innovation Socially and Cognitively: The Team Model of
Skanova Networks. Journal of Management. European Journal of Innovation
Management. Volume 5 . Number 3 . 2002 . pp. 172-180.
_ Comments and criticisms welcomed.
Kwesi Great.
