Courtesy : School of Science innovation

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020  defines innovation as “a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value”. Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies. # ISO certification in India

Innovation often takes place through the development of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art works  or business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society. Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention: innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (i.e. new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in a market or society, and not all innovations require a new invention.# ISO certification in India

Technical innovation often manifests itself via the engineering process when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature. The opposite of innovation is exnovation.# ISO certification in India

Definition

Surveys of the literature on innovation have found a variety of definitions. In 2009, Baregheh et al. found around 60 definitions in different scientific papers, while a 2014 survey found over 40. Based on their survey, Baragheh et al. attempted to define a multidisciplinary definition and arrived at the following definition:

“Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace.# ISO certification in India

In an industrial survey of how the software industry defined innovation, the following definition given by Crossan and Apaydin was considered to be the most complete, which builds on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) manual’s definition:

Innovation is production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and the establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome.# ISO certification in India

American sociologist Everett Rogers, defined it as follows:

“An idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption”

According to Alan Altshuler and Robert D. Behn, innovation includes original invention and creative use and defines innovation as a generation, admission and realization of new ideas, products, services and processes.# ISO certification in India

Two main dimensions of innovation are degree of novelty (i.e. whether an innovation is new to the firm, new to the market, new to the industry, or new to the world) and kind of innovation (i.e. whether it is process or product-service system innovation). In organizational scholarship, researchers have also distinguished innovation to be separate from creativity, by providing an updated definition of these two related constructs:

Workplace creativity concerns the cognitive and behavioral processes applied when attempting to generate novel ideas. Workplace innovation concerns the processes applied when attempting to implement new ideas. Specifically, innovation involves some combination of problem/opportunity identification, the introduction, adoption or modification of new ideas germane to organizational needs, the promotion of these ideas, and the practical implementation of these ideas.# ISO certification in India

Peter Drucker wrote:

Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution, or a new venture started by a lone individual in the family kitchen. It is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth.

Creativity and innovation

In general, innovation is distinguished from creativity by its emphasis on the implementation of creative ideas in an economic setting. Amabile and Pratt in 2016, drawing on the literature, distinguish between creativity (“the production of novel and useful ideas by an individual or small group of individuals working together”) and innovation (“the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization”)

Types

Several frameworks have been proposed for defining types of innovation.

Sustaining vs disruptive innovation

One framework proposed by Clayton Christensen draws a distinction between sustaining and disruptive innovations.Sustaining innovation is the improvement of a product or service based on the known needs of current customers (e.g. faster microprocessors, flat screen televisions). Disruptive innovation in contrast refers to a process by which a new product or service creates a new market (e.g. transistor radio, free crowdsourced encyclopedia, etc.), eventually displacing established competitors. According to Christensen, disruptive innovations are critical to long-term success in business.# ISO certification in India

Disruptive innovation is often enabled by disruptive technology. Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani define foundational technology as having the potential to create new foundations for global technology systems over the longer term. Foundational technology tends to transform business operating models as entirely new business models emerge over many years, with gradual and steady adoption of the innovation leading to waves of technological and institutional change that gain momentum more slowly. The advent of the packet-switched communication protocol TCP/IP—originally introduced in 1972 to support a single use case for United States Department of Defense electronic communication (email), and which gained widespread adoption only in the mid-1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web—is a foundational technology.# ISO certification in India

Four types innovation model

Another framework was suggested by Henderson and Clark. They divide innovation into four types;

• Radical innovation: “establishes a new dominant design and, hence, a new set of core design concepts embodied in components that are linked together in a new architecture.” (p. 11)
• Incremental innovation: “refines and extends an established design. Improvement occurs in individual components, but the underlying core design concepts, and the links between them, remain the same.” (p. 11)
• Architectural innovation: “innovation that changes only the relationships between them [the core design concepts]” (p. 12)
• Modular Innovation: “innovation that changes only the core design concepts of a technology” (p. 12)

While Henderson and Clark as well as Christensen talk about technical innovation there are other kinds of innovation as well, such as service innovation and organizational innovation.# ISO certification in India

Non-economic innovation

The classical definition of innovation being limited to the primary goal of generating profit for a firm, has led others to define other types of innovation such as: social innovation, sustainable innovation (or green innovation), and responsible innovation.# ISO certification in India