INSTITUTIONALISING INNOVATION

INTRODUCTION: Necessity is the mother of all inventions was the mantra in the research and scholarly world in 1800s which led to the industrial revolution and almost fulfilled all the human necessities, since then world has changed and now we can comprehend No Innovation No existence and now innovation is the necessity to survive. For most firms competing in the global economy, the urgent message in our time is to innovate and adapt or face the prospect of extinction. To respond to this challenge, their management is called upon to evaluate the quality of each firm's innovation process. This can be measured by the amount of new revenues and profits it generates, by the speed of introducing new innovations to the marketplace and by well-planned initiatives to reduce their ecological footprint. In recent years we have witnessed a dramatic decline in a business firm's expected lifetime. A dramatic drop from 4045 years in 1990 to 18 years in 2008 has been attributed to the continually increasing rate of change in the business environment. More recently, the significant pressures for firms to adapt have been reinforced by the impact of the 2008 2009 global economic crisis causing even role model firms such as General Motors, Sony and Toyota to sustain huge financial losses. In this new setting with on-going shifts in customer preferences in developed and developing economies, innovation has been replacing quality as the main source of competitive advantage. The needed adaptation to a changing business landscape can occur only through successful innovations for new products or processes, innovations for more effective business models and innovations for new leadership styles and organisational structures. Despite a widespread acceptance of innovation's importance by the leadership of most companies, as recorded in recent executive surveys, there is a general dissatisfaction with the results realised from their innovation investments. Managing the quality of the innovation process for survival and excellence in adaptation requires a systemic view of the innovation process, using a balanced set of innovation metrics which inform and enable managers to make desirable interventions on the stages of the innovation value-chain. APPROACH The information is accelerating the innovation that has rapidly become a distinguishing factor to maintain the leadership position and financial performance of a corporation. The big question unanswered is how much change can be called as disruptive or innovation, How to institutionalise the innovation and how to measure the innovation. The corporates across the globe follow different models to institutionalise innovation and TRIZ is one model adopted by most global players in 2000. ABOUT TRIZ MODEL: To institutionalise the Innovation first, we need to understand that how innovation evolves or it is just a spontaneous ideas. TRIZ is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature. It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science fiction author Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as "the theory of inventive problem solving, and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS. Altshuller screened patents in order to find out what kind of contradictions were resolved or dissolved by the invention and the way this had been achieved. From this, he developed a set of 40 inventive

principles and later a matrix of contradictions. Rows of the matrix indicate the 39 system features that one typically wants to improve, such as speed, weight, accuracy of measurement and so on. Columns refer to typical undesired results. Each matrix cell points to principles that have been most frequently used in patents in order to resolve the contradiction.

TRIZ PROCESS FOR CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

Apart from TRIZ model many organizations have derived their own approach like, SIT (systematic inventive thinking),ASIT (advanced systematic inventive thinking) USIT (unified structured inventive thinking),JUSIT (Japanese version of unified systematic inventive thinking) TRIZICS (A methodology for the systematic application of TRIZ),TrizIT (Triz modified for information technology). CASE: INSTITUTIONALISNG THE INNOVATION THROUGH TRIZ MODEL BY SAMSUNG An innovation method that Samsung adopted from 2000 onwards but which only reached American companies from the mid-2000s onwards (Intel is a user).Samsung had early successes with TRIZ, saving over $100 million in its first few projects. It was also adopting Six Sigma at the time. But it was TRIZ that became the bedrock of innovation at Samsung. And it was introduced at Samsung by Russian engineers whom Samsung had hired into its Seoul Labs in the early 2000s. In 2003 TRIZ led to 50 new patents for Samsung and in 2004 one project alone, a DVD pick-up innovation, saved Samsung over $100 million. TRIZ is now an obligatory skill set if you want to advance within Samsung. What we know from this is how Samsung approaches innovation. It is not a competitive race, as it seems to be in Apple, or based on giving engineers more bench time as it is at Google. Rather it is based on developing creative elite. The diagram below explains that. It is taken from this presentation. The presentation also explains how Samsung used TRIZ to get to its Super AMOLED displays.

FRAME WORK: Prior to the establishment of an innovation cell vertical, organizations needs to infuse the innovative culture in the organization. Organization needs to create room for innovation, if one looks at typical residential layout which includes rooms for different activities cooking, living, dining. if one enters the kitchen he gets idea of food and cooking and if one gets into study room he gets ideas about topic in mind, similarly organizations needs to create an environment to get ideas from the employees, this similar set of process is followed by GOOGLE Inc. Many organizations is of a taught that innovation is invention and end up in reinventing the wheel, organizations needs to understand innovation is disruptive idea. Organizations need to create an innovative environment through employee engagement initiates and rewarding the ideas which has impact on bottom line of the organization. Innovation needs to be imparted in Business score card by which innovation can be made accountable in the business process and planning, and goal settings. CHALLENGES IN INSTITUTIONALISING THE INNOVATION: Institutionalising the innovation is not a cake walk for any organizations it needs lot of taught process and change management capabilities and strong leadership to institutionalise the innovation. The major challenges in the process are. Idea management: After creating an innovation cell the ideas may flood into the system which needs critical examination and are to be screened based on economic viability. Employee concerns: Leadership should create the environment to synergise the innovative capabilities of the workforce and never set targets to its employees then the whole idea get dissolved and people tend to work in fashion as they were doing earlier.

CONCLUSION: In this age of information organizations with legacy also needs to be focused on various fronts like customer demand, cost, product differentiation and competition. To survive and to sustain in the market every organization must take an approach and give a proper framework to innovation management which is the need of the hour.

AUTHOR: CHETHAN KUMAR M A COMPANY: TATA MOTORS LTD E MAIL: chethan.kumar@tatamotors.com Mob: 8603210574