Entrepreneurship Part 7 - Sources of Innovation

Hey there and welcome back to part 7 of the series of entrepreneurship.

Today we will have a talk about sources of innvation, according to Peter Ducker there are four areas of opportunities within industries and organizations:

1. Incongruities
   occur whenever a gap exists between expectations and reality

2. Industry and market changes
   emerge as the result of continual shifts in the marketplace, caused by changes in customer attitudes, advances in technology or industry growth

3. Unexpected occurrences
   are productive sources of innovation because most people dismiss, disregard or even resent them

4. Process needs
   arise whenever a demand arises to innovate as a way of answering a particular need

If you look at the social environment of an organization you will have additional sources of innovation such as:

1. New knowledge
   can create innovations that differ in their predictability as well as in the changes they pose to entrepreneurs. Innovations in bioscience or nanotechnology are cases in point

2. Perceptual changes
   open up new opportunities when members of a community change their interpretation of facts and figures

3. Demographic changes
   are the most reliable changes, providing precise pictures of future ager and population structures

There are different trends an organization should permanently monitor, to recognize relevant developments that can be a source of innovation.

All upfront goes the TECHNOLOGY, which technologies are relevant for the company in the future? Concerning MARKET and CUSTOMERS, are there changes in customer needs and tastes that imply risks or opportunities for the organization? How can information about customer needs be collected? And finally what about COMPETITION? Which innovation is to be expected on the market? Are there any new products, services or processes introduced in the market by competitors and if so, are they successful?

Want to learn more about the KANO model read here.

When thinking about creativity typically you will be able to divide them into three main components:

1. Creative Thinking Skills
   How do people approach problems?

2. Knowledge
   Everything a person knows and can do

3. Motivation
   What people actually do

Next step is to look at some creativity techniques:

Problem reversal

• State the problem in reverse (change a positive statement into a negative one)

• Figure out what everybody else is not doing

• Change the direction or location of perspective

Forced analogy

• Take a fixed element, such as a product or the idea of a product

• Force it, to take the attributes of another unrelated element

• This should form a free flow of associations

Attribute listing

• List all major attributes of a product, object or idea

• For each of the attributes, list ways each of these attributes could be changed, e.g. CASE > is made out of PLASTIC > can be made out of METAL

Mind maps/concept maps

Brainstorming

But in the end you can’t force creativity, when looking on the distribution of when ideas develop we see that only 24% are developed while working and 76% are developed outside the company:

Based on this you might think about what factors are then influencing creativity? Well here are some examples:

Encouragement of creativity
Creativity can be enhanced through:

• Encouragement of risk-taking and of idea generation

• Valuing innovation throughout all management levels

• Perceived supervisor support

• Fair and supportive evaluations and so on

Autonomy
Is creativity fostered when teams have a high autonomy in daily work and a sense of ownership and control over their own work and ideas.

Resources
Resource allocation is directly related to creativity levels of a project.

Pressures
Pressures can support creativity when it is perceived as arising from the urgent, intellectual, challenging nature of a problem, but it can also undermine creativity, when it reaches an undesirable high level.

Mental Blocks
Creativity can be impeded by various mental blocks such as prejudice or functional fixation.