Formal and Sustained Management of Incremental

Technology Innovation: An Improvement to

Corporate Technology Infrastructure

By Saahil Goel, Student, Katz Graduate School of Business

Brian Butler, Head – MIS Department, Katz Graduate School of Business

December 1, 2008
 Contents Executive Summary

Executive Summary
The Issue, context and
motivation
2

3
W ith the changing economic
landscape, both large and small
corporations are relying on
innovation – in business processes and in
technology to enable cost savings from
The Position and Perspective 7 process improvementi.

Recommendations 12 Innovation is defined as “The managed

References 15 effort of an organization to develop new
products or services or new uses for
existing products or services”.
Technology innovation is defined as “A
change in appearance or performance of
products or services or the physical
processes through which a product or
service passes”. Finally, incremental
innovation is defined as “A new product,
service, or technology that modifies an
existing one”ii. From these definitions and
basic derivation, “incremental technology
innovation” can be defined as a managed
change in the process technology that an
organization uses to deliver its products or
services that modifies or builds upon the
existent process or technology.

Incremental innovation is relatively

short-term in terms of benefit generation
and is applied in smaller and measurable
chunks. This considerably lowers the
level of risk that a firm faces by
indulgence in the process of such
innovation. Incremental innovation
attempts to improve an existing product
or service by innovating around what’s
availableiii. Further, when incremental
technology innovation is applied across
an enterprise, it can bring about
significant improvements in a company’s
internal processes and business
technology infrastructure.

December 1, 2008
The fundamental issue with The Issue, context and
incremental innovation is
mismanagement of such motivation
innovative practices. Factors such
as timing, resource allocation, idea

D
ue to the ever evolving technology
generation, selection and landscape, it is difficult to make
prioritization, competitive innovative technology decisions
landscape and measurement that would best solve business problems.
criteria make incremental Today, several technologies are available
innovation extremely difficult to for each and every leg and each and every
manage using any pre-determined fingernail of those legs of any business
formal process. Incremental corporation. To be able to identify the
innovation also has to deal with best portfolio of technology innovation to
fostering a culture of innovation use for each business problem presents a
amongst the company employees – unique and mammoth challenge for
to encourage managers and organizations. Further, since knowledge
decision-makers to implement is diffused amongst various
innovative and lateral thinking in implementation-level employees, it is also
all their problem-solving attempts. difficult to manage innovative technology
Further, innovative idea ideas that are generated at the grass-root
management should occur at a level. Ideas may come from all levels of
company-wide level which forward-thinking technology
requires careful reception, implementers. The real challenge is in
prioritization and implementation identifying the ideas which would
of innovative ideas from grass- generate most value for decision-making,
roots levels all the way to the top prioritizing them, experimenting with
management. them and then actually implementing
them in a corporate setting.

The issue of management of incremental

technology innovation is fundamentally
difficult due to several reasons.

First, there is a cultural aspect involved

with ingraining innovation into the
mindset of a company’s employees. For
incremental innovation to be successful,
the company’s top management should
foster a corporate culture of innovation
and ensure that the message reaches
every level of an organization. However,
in most companies top management is
used to running existing business and is
not very focused on building future

Page 3 of 16
competenciesiv. This is usually left
to the strategic business centers
within an organization. Further,
because of the level of detail
involved in incremental
innovation, management is not
clearly aware of the value it may
add to the company. Due to the
lack of cultural awareness about
innovation, management may also
become a hindrance by not
providing enough human and
economic resources to aid
innovation. For this reason, there
are talks about having a Chief
Innovation Officer in companiesv.
However, the innovative-culture-
drive should be only geared
towards creation of a culture
where individuals who want to be
innovative are encouraged to do
so. A culture where innovation is
“forced” will lead to failure as
employees who want to go about
routine work (and should) will not
do so as they would like a piece of
the innovation-idea-reward pie.
Second, in addition to getting top-
management support for
technology innovation there are
challenges inherent to the
reception and prioritization of
innovation ideas. To begin with, a
company has to encourage
employees who are intimate with
the processes and technology to
make suggestions about
innovation. Rather than
conducting an organization-wide
study of areas where
improvements could be made,
encouraging people who are on
the “ground” is an easier way for
Page 4 of 16
companies to receive ideas about
innovation. Once such a culture and
platform is established to manage receipt
of innovative ideas from employees at the
grassroots, the real challenge is to
prioritize these ideas. Due to the
uncertain nature of innovative ideas, it is
difficult to put a dollar figure to the
improvement a certain idea might cause.
In fact, some ideas may actually be
destructive in nature and may lead to a
loss for organizations. Due to the risk and
uncertainty involved in prioritization of
innovative ideas, it is difficult for
companies to come up with any kind of a
prioritization matrix.
Further, because each innovative idea is
unique and is dependent on the
company’s line of business, the current
technology portfolio, company size,
geographic location, future aspirations
etc., it is difficult to create or utilize any
premade benchmarking / prioritization
criteria for putting a value to an
innovative idea. Due to these reasons,
only innovative ideas that have a very
clear business impact or are very low risk
get adopted first and more often than not
other ideas never see the light of day. It is
those ideas that may have had the
potential to cause significant
improvement in certain areas of the
company’s technology landscape. The
difficulty however, is to manage risk and
return.
Also owing to wide spectrum and depth of
all technologies available in the
marketplace, there may be conflicting
innovative ideas received from employees
in a company. Both ideas may be equally
useful or equally destructive, but without
expertise on which ideas to adopt,
companies are left open to risk or to
complete non-acceptance of
innovative ideas. This is especially
a challenge for incremental
technology innovation since the
number of permutations an entire
technology infrastructure – devote 20% of their work times towards
including various
hardware/network layers and
various enterprise software layers
– could be mind boggling. Without
an environment for controlled and
formal experimentation, it is
extremely difficult for companies
to evaluate the best innovative
idea that is generated by
employees.
Third, the way corporate
organizational structures are
setup are not conducive to
boosting innovation. Unless
corporations have a dedication
innovation group within the
technology division or at an
enterprise level, whose primary
purpose is to manage innovation
and to ensure that ideas are
implemented, there is very little
accountability or responsibility for
implementation, measurement and
tracking of such ideas. Lack of
organizational support in terms of
human resources, budget and
company resources for
implementation of innovative
ideas can be the top cause for
failure or non-implementation of
innovative technology ideas. For
example, a Network Worldwide
Poll in 21 countries reveals that
only 16% of companies reward
employees for innovationvi. This
figure is a clear representation of
the lack of organizational support
Page 5 of 16
and the anti-innovation culture that
companies are unknowingly fostering.
There are a few companies that
wholeheartedly support innovation. For
example, Google expects its employees to
innovationvii. Companies also do not have
an environment where innovative ideas
could be successfully tested and valued by
dedicated personnel.
Fourth, in addition to the complexity
involved with corporate cultures,
organizational structures and the
prioritization of ideas – there is no clear
process around the implementation of
incremental technology ideas. Due to the
intrinsic uncertain nature of incremental
innovative ideas and to the uniqueness
and wide span of potential
implementation, there is no industry-
benchmarked process that has been
established for successful implementation
of such innovative ideas. While there may
a generally known macro-level
implementation process – such as
identify, prioritize, obtain resources, test
and implement – there are no specific
processes to manage implementation of
different kinds of incremental innovation.
For example, an incremental innovation
could be a reduction of redundant batch
processes for a certain application for a
certain kind of technology platform.
There is no set industry-level process for
managing the implementation of such an
innovation project or a method for
allocating resources to implement such a
change. Also, since most companies do
not incentivize the implementation of
such innovative ideas, the redundant
process may go on forever causing the
company extra resources, extra lead time
and lower competitive advantage. There
is also no way to measure the success or
failure of incremental innovation
(which corresponds to the
productivity paradox related to
measurement of success of
information technology in
general).
At present, there are only a few
companies who are tuned into the
idea of incremental innovation and
very few companies have actually
taken aggressive steps to make
innovation a part of the way they
operate. However, companies are
increasingly acknowledging the
value incremental technology
innovation can add to their
organizations. In general however,
technologists (or technology
implementers) are aware of
cutting edge technology and
usually are the first to innovate or
to generate innovative ideasviii.
Part of the reason for this is the
fact that technology
implementation is an art rather
than a science and there are
several ways of achieving the same
outcome. Therefore, there are
several ways of innovating a
company’s technology
infrastructure that may lead to
improvement.
These employees care about
innovation because they derive
satisfaction from the growth that
innovation drives in a company.
These set of individuals are well
aligned with a company’s
principles and hold the company’s
growth close to heart. Another
reason why these employees
bother with innovation is the fact
Page 6 of 16
they have the technical knowhow of how
to bring about improvement and growth
by way of innovative practices.
Employees may also be dedicated to
making processes better and more
streamlined thereby making their and
their colleagues’ work simpler.
Companies that understand incremental
technology innovation better are more
geared towards implementing initiatives
that derive the most value from such
initiatives. These companies are also
abreast with cutting-edge technology
trends and strive towards establishment
of a corporate culture where innovation is
incented. Such corporations could
considerably reduce their overhead
expenses by employing innovative
practices to improve processes. Pro-
innovation companies can also achieve
significant competitive advantage by
lowering costs and may even be able to
improve sales by employing innovative
technology to create new product line or
be able to introduce significant
improvements in existing products. For
example, by using incremental innovative
technology in the supply chain area Wal-
Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest
discount retailer, has enabled low-cost
logistics and a highly lean and efficient
supply chain technology infrastructure.
This has been the foundation of their
success and has caused them to be the
largest (recently) company in the world
and also one of the most profitable.
On the other hand, companies that do not
innovate or those that do not stress the
importance of incremental innovation
through their corporate cultures or by
way of incentive programs are at risk of
losing out on competitive advantage and
on increasing costs. Such
companies may also not be able
grow as fast as their competitors
since any growth strategy would
incur significantly higher costs.
Many corporations today would
fail to even exist was it not for
their innovative strategies. For
example, large corporations such
that have rigid corporate
organizational structures and
closed-minded top management
may be prone to increased costs
due to adoption of older
technology infrastructure
methods. The mentality of using
the same “success formula” over
and over again may lead
companies to their grave.
Companies that do not constantly
innovate their business practices
using intelligent application of
technology will not be able to
survive in the fiercely competitive
world.
Due to these reasons, it is
extremely important for
companies to find ways to
incrementally innovative in
technology and internal business
processes to be able to make the
most of what they have available
internally in terms of employee
knowledge and expertise with
technology and process. The real
challenge with implementing a
system that would work is the
breadth and variety of challenges
that are faced and the degree of
varying opinions help by industry
experts on a resolution for this
problem.
Page 7 of 16
The Position and
Perspective
E
ven though there is ample
knowledge and industry best
practices available on how to bring
about a culture of innovation and how to
manage such innovation, there are no
agreed upon standards or best practices
about how incremental technology
innovation can be measured, managed,
prioritized, sustained and implemented in
all kinds of organizations. Part of the
reason why this question is difficult to
answer is because of the scope of the
technologies that currently exist in the
world, the changing applications of these
technologies by changing business
models and because of the variety of
practices around this process. In the
current economic landscape it is
imperative that business adopt innovative
practices if they want to cut costs, gain
competitive advantage, be more lean and
streamlined and simply, if they want to
survive in the market.
As is discussed in the article - “Want to
Create an Innovative Culture? Here’s
how” - to implement innovation at an
organization, creating a culture of
innovation is the most daunting taskix. It
is also the most important task in the
process of enabling innovation. Unless a
company’s managers and employees
embrace innovation and it becomes a core
value for the organization, it will not be
effectively implemented and true value
will not be derived from it. The Wall
Street Journal presents Technology
Innovation Awards every year to the most
innovative companiesx. While this goes to
prove that innovation is extremely
important for competitive success,
it also alludes to the fact that the
most information available in
general business journals is
around measuring the outcome of
innovation and not the
implementation itself.
As was the case with Wall Street
Journal, Business Week also
stresses the importance of Radical
Innovation and a high-level
overview of its implementation in
the article “Radical Service
Innovation”xi. The article describes
the importance of innovation for
service-delivery companies but
stress the importance of “radical
innovation” for this industry
segment. Company executives
acknowledge that there are several
innovative ideas available within a
company but the execution of
these ideas is the more difficult
feat. Variables such as “the
alignment of the right idea, the
right team, the right development
process, the right leadership, the
right level of risk management, the
right target, the right time to
market” are some of the factors
that need to be considered when
making decisions about
implementation of innovative
practices within a company. This
article is geared more towards
using innovation to bring out
better products in the market for
the end-consumer and not so
much about creating innovative
practices within a company to
bring about cost savings and
competitive advantages.
Page 8 of 16
Just as WSJ, Business Week also releases
ratings of the most innovative companies
each year in their “The World's Most
Innovative Companies” releasexii. This list
describes the top innovative companies in
the world along with descriptions about
what makes these companies innovative.
In tandem with the earlier article about
adding value to businesses by using
innovation to create new product lines,
this list too is compiled by evaluating
which companies have added most value
to the end customer and not to the
organization internally. However, some
knowledge about incremental innovation
may be extracted from this list by
averaging out the best innovative
practices performed by these companies.
Nevertheless, there is no direct
information available about how
incremental technology innovation may
be managed in an enterprise.
In more Information Systems related
journals, such as in the article “HP CIO
Randy Mott: Incremental IT 'Just Doesn't
Work'” in Information Week, stress is
again laid on the poor outcomes of
incremental IT and the value that radical
innovation can bring to a companyxiii. The
article goes on to describe that by picking
and choosing (prioritizing) what needs to
be improved (aka incremental
innovation), a company is setting itself up
for failure. There are also potential
upsides to incremental innovation
though. For example, incremental
innovation allows smaller companies to
focus on what their pressing concern is at
the moment. Also, the risk involved with
investments in incremental technology
innovation is considerably lower as
compared to radical innovation.
In another article “From Idea to
Innovation” in Information Week,
David Greenfield attacks the
innovation management problem
head onxiv. Some ways to manage
incremental innovation are
strikingly interesting as per this
article. For example, GE Research
used a unique form of online
voting where they let 85 of their
researches “trade” innovative
ideas on a virtual exchange to see
which of the 62 innovative ideas
had the highest priority. This is a
very unique way of prioritizing
innovative ideas in a company and
captures the “collective wisdom”
of the actual people that are most
knowledgeable about it. But this
approach worked for GE alone and
that too in a specific setting and a
specific genre of innovative ideas
for research. With that level of
specificity such a method cannot
be deemed a best practice and
viewed as an industry-level
theorem. As the article also points
out – “… is not an everyday part of
its innovation process. The
algorithm itself was basic research
and not a product”. Similarly, Dell
and Starbucks also used online
voting platforms to get their
customers to vote on the ideas that
they thought would be most useful
for these companies. HP and other
companies use concepts from “The
Wisdom of Crowds” by enabling
“voting” techniques to prioritize
the most useful innovative
concepts. However, due to the
intricacies involved in making sure
that predications are accurate,
such methods are difficult to
Page 9 of 16
employ as a cookie-cutter approach. The
article does highlight the benefit of using
the GE methodology of the “stock market
approach” since voters would give more
careful thought to the decisions they
make since there may be virtual (or real)
money involved. The article then
highlights information around the risks
and rewards of the “Prediction Markets”
approach and discusses some vendors
that are involved in this market. The
drawback of this approach is that there is
no penalty for a bad idea and popularity
may not reflect the likelihood of market
success. Therefore, voting may not always
work. Another instance described in the
article is of Qualcomm where the
company wanted to implement
innovative ideas and have the idea
generators owns the ideas from inception
to implementation. However, a simple
collection of ideas led to an overwhelming
“Craigslist” type list. The company then
implemented a voting process that would
cut ideas into a list of the top 30 or 40
most popular ones. These ideas were then
“traded” in Consensus Point prediction
market software. The 10 highest-value
ideas are presented to the CEO and then
the final list of implementable ideas is
selected. While these may be some ways
of prioritizing innovation, there is some
discussion on actual implementation of
innovation technology in companies as
well. For example, at Harrah’s
Entertainment, incremental innovation
ideas are tested as a separate unit, with
different IT and simulated conditions to
test the likelihood of success and chances
of failure of different ideas generated
within the company. As is clear from the
above summary of the article, it is
extremely difficult to come up with a
proven approach for managing and
sustaining incremental technology
innovation in a company. Even
though there may be success
stories and failure reports, it is
difficult to come up with the one
approach that works for everyone.
In yet another Information Week
article, “The ROI Of Innovation”,
Rob Preston describes the
importance of technology
innovation and the problems with
implementation of the samexv. The
article describes the culture
around incremental innovation in
companies and what makes
implementation difficult. “Most
executives pay lip service to
innovation, but few take the time
to really manage and measure it.
The metrics that would drive
better performance -- time to
market and return on innovation
investment -- are used by only
18% and 22% of respondents. The
most popular metrics -- customer
satisfaction (57%) and overall
revenue growth (51%) -- are more
after the fact”. This ties in well
with the information gathered
from general business journals
about there being more stress on
innovation to bring new products
to satisfy customers in the market
rather than on improving
conditions within the company by
enabling a new way of doing
things. The article goes on to
describe that creating an
innovation company requires a
complete shift in perception or the
rewiring of the company “DNA”.
Also, innovation is the surest way
to build shareholder value.
Page 10 of 16
Further, technology innovation is
described as something that needs to be a
part of the entire organization and that
funding for IT innovation should flow
through a single organizational unit
which lies outside of IT. There is also
discussion about the need for
incentivizing innovation to ensure its
success, adoption and sustenance.
Quocirca Ltd. agrees that creation of ideas
and implementing them for innovation is
the right way to maximize the value of
intellectual propertyxvi. The white paper
describes that innovation has to be the
very part of an organization’s DNA for it
to be successfully implemented. The
paper concludes by saying that by
involving the “crowd” and having THEM
come up with innovative ideas as well as
implement them is the best way to go
forward. However, not much information
is offered on what may be the best
process to go about this except for taking
each organizational vertical at a time and
then implementing best practices for that
particular branch of the company. The
paper brings out an interesting point
about there being “no single approach”
that will create a well-rounded solution.
This comment is consistent with what has
been discovered from other sources of
information.
The DeSai Group in their whitepaper
“Mastering Innovation” also argue that
the most burning issue around innovation
is “how to institutionalize innovation” –
i.e. how to build a climate and culture of
innovation while maintaining standards
and controls necessary for ongoing
governancexvii. Also stressed in the paper
is the usefulness of harvesting internal
innovation that arises from a company’s
own workforce that is intimate
with the technology and with the
business processes. The DeSai
Group provides its clients on a
Strategy Driven Innovation (SDI)
framework that is tweaked
according to how its clients wish to
maximize value – Top Line
Growth, Shareholder Value or
Bottom-Line Optimization. The SDI
framework can help DeSai’s clients
design a customized roadmap for
innovation. The framework is
composed of four levers –
Venturing for Best, Agility for
Speed, Behaviors for Growth and
Climate & Culture for Success.
Within each of these levers are
described the opportunities for
innovation, barriers and
challenges to overcome and the
target outcome.
Even though various vendors offer
services and frameworks around
management of innovation, to
address the scale and breadth of
technology innovation possible, to
customize innovation management
solutions to fit each company’s
corporate culture, line of business
and vision statement and to
prioritize innovative ideas to best
fit a company’s needs continue to
be puzzles that are yet to be solved
by consultants or vendors.
However, in one or another form,
there is general agreement with
information that is available in
general and information systems
specific trade press and journals.
Page 11 of 16
In general, this issue is related to
management of innovation and idea
generation within a company from the
point of reception, prioritization,
enablement, implementation, culture and
finally outcome. More specifically, the
paper deals with technology innovation
that is brought about in an incremental
fashion. These specifics introduce even
more difficulties because of the nature of
technology and different applications of
it. Further, incremental innovation puts
the problems in the hands of the
organizational workforce and not a “few
enlightened souls”. Therefore,
incremental technology innovation
management becomes even a harder
problem to solve.
As per the article “Assessment
methodology to prioritize knowledge
management related activities to support
organizational excellence” by Manfred
Bornemann and Martin Sammer, “So far,
a systematic and comprehensive
assessment tool to prioritize
organizational development activities,
especially in the currently intensely
discussed domain of knowledge
management is not available in the
literature”xviii. Clearly in academic
literature, this is generally accepted as a
hard problem to solve. The
aforementioned paper also goes on to
describe a proposed methodology which
is based on utilizing knowledge that is
existent within a company. “The
methodology stresses four levels of
potential intervention, starting with the
strategy focused target level, next a
knowledge level covering all knowledge
workers of an organization, then an
action level focusing on operations and
processes and finally a data level with the
explicitly available stock of
(digital) resources”. This paper
goes into depth to describe how
incremental technology innovation
may be managed in corporations
using a premade methodology and
is obviously the very first step
towards this endeavor.
Page 12 of 16
Recommendations
A
s difficult implementation and
sustenance of incremental
technology innovation may be, the
benefits it brings to any organization are
worthwhile. Due to the complexity
around the effective implementation of
the same, an organization must foster a
culture of openness towards acceptance
of innovation, incentivize innovation,
create frameworks that suit its business
model and technology infrastructure best,
pilot test innovation ideas, get business
and employee buy-in and have an open
mind. Also, extremely important is the
championship of senior leadership
towards this initiative. Not only can such
championship help the company foster an
innovative culture, it can also reflect
favorably for the company in the eyes of
external customers, valuators and
shareholders.
Creating a culture of innovation has to
start with the acceptance of the need to
create such a culture. This need needs to
arise out of the understanding that
incremental technology innovation can
improve internal business process and
can bring about internal and external
benefits in terms of cost savings,
reputation and employee satisfaction.
Once this understanding exists in the
minds of senior IT and/or business
leaders, the steps towards fostering an
organization-wide culture could be taken.
By involving business unit leaders, IT
groups and senior leadership in the
process to foster an innovative culture, a
corporation ensures that the initiative
sees the light of day and is actually fruitful
at the end of the day. This happens
because incremental innovation
then becomes the goal of everyone
and not just a few people who are
passionate about it.
This can be done by educating
employees and management about
the benefits that can be achieved
by implementing incremental
technology measures in a Further, since it is difficult to classify
particular corporation. Marketing
campaigns could be organized
which advertise the importance of
“submitting your idea” or the
importance of thinking outside the
box.
Another effective way of fostering
a culture around innovation is by
incentivizing innovation. While it
may not be possible for all
companies to force their
employees to dedicate their time
towards innovation, a certain
mechanism - such as most
innovative project award – will
certainly help show a company’s
employees that it is serious about
innovation.
Processes and frameworks also
play a very crucial role for a
corporation trying to implement
incremental technology
innovation.
To begin, a focus group could be
brought together with leaders
from each business unit and from
several IT units along with top
management and a project charter
could be defined which outlines
how the project will proceed. Also,
resource constraints, policies,
Page 13 of 16
processes, commitment and mission
statement could be finalized upfront to
avoid losing track of the project in the
future. Performance metrics could put
into place at the beginning of the
transformation to ensure that innovative
projects are monitored throughout their
lifecycle.
innovative projects as either IT OR
business processes, a different lifecycle of
implementation could be instated for
such projects. A sample lifecycle could be:
1. Prioritize Innovative Technology
Ideas
2. Select the top 5
3. Organize teams and project scope
4. Identify test/pilot
environment/users
5. Deploy pilot
6. Report results of Pilot
7. Send best performer (of the pilot)
into production – which could then
follow the regular business
implementation or IT
implementation process
Prioritization of innovative technology
ideas is also an important point of debate
in current IT, business and academic
literature. Since every company may have
different priorities and different existing
human, technical and corporate
resources, it is important to devise some
kind of a “framework” on which
innovative ideas can be ranked and
prioritized. The framework can be a living
document which is created from inputs of
various stakeholders in the company (IT,
Business, Employees). Another method
for prioritization could be employed
using the “Predictive Markets” approach.
This approach can help get public
consensus on the set of the best
ideas to be accepted for piloting.
This process is democratic and is
therefore more inclined to boost
employee satisfaction and a feeling
of fairness amongst the idea-
generators. Other factors used to
“judge” an idea could be – return
on investment, scope of impact,
business unit it pertains to, how
well it aligns with the company’s
vision, which stakeholders does it
affect/benefit, risk implication and
probability, future implications,
etc.

Technical infrastructure could be

installed that facilitates the idea
generation, reception and
prioritization process. For
example, a web-based application
can be designed that helps classify
(to some extent) the ideas being
generated by employees and then
screens out (automatically) the
most relevant ideas as defined by a
predetermined set of
organizational priorities. Further,
these ideas could then be traded or
could be evaluated as per a pre-
designed matrix/framework before
finally deciding which ideas would
need to go into production or pilot.

Page 14 of 16
References
i
http://weblog.tekrati.com/?p=4937
This article mentions that two-thirds of
Global 1000 companies will have
formalized technology innovation processes
by 2010.
ii
http://college.cengage.com/business/griffin/
management/7e/students/glossary/ch13.html
“Management” by Ricky W. Griffin (Texas
A&M University)
“Managing Organization Change and
Innovation” - Chapter 13
This is a definition of various innovative
organizational management concepts and
terminology.
iii
Managing Technology Innovation by
Frederick Betz
http://books.google.com/books?id=KnpGtu-
R77UC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=increm
ental+technology+innovation&source=web
&ots=R-
QRfsgfyx&sig=WOAbARIsIgCwtUpoTbFE
YsT_Mfc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&r
esnum=5&ct=result
This book describes the differences between
radical and incremental innovation.
iv
http://www.johnstark.com/in21.html
“Innovation Management” by John Stark
This website has information about the
various kinds of innovation and difficulties
around management of the same.
v x
http://innovation.corante.com/editorial/archi
ves/2006/04/should_companies_have_a_chi
ef.php
“Should Companies have a Chief Innovation
Officer” by Renee Hopkins Callahan
This article describes why organizations
should or shouldn’t have a dedicated person
responsible for innovation. It also talks
about the difficulties of managing
innovation and importance of having it for
organizations.
vi
http://www.the-
network.com/content/en/news/show/?artid=
88
Page 15 of 16
“Does Your Company Reward Innovative Ideas”
This article describes some figures about the present
level of innovation across global corporations. It goes
directly to support the premise of the paper that
fostering a culture of innovation is difficult.
vii
The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark
Malseed
This book describes Google Inc. and the methods
they employ to foster a culture of innovation within
their company.
viii
http://lessig.org/blog/2004/08/who_cares_about_inno
vation.html
“Who cares about innovation”
This weblog talks about personnel within
organizations to whom innovation is important.
ix
http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/11/20/w
ant-to-create-an-innovative-culture-heres-how/
“Want to Create an Innovative Culture? Here’s How”
by Kelly Spors
This article describes why it is important for
companies to adopt innovation and how they can use
innovation to their advantage in these tough
economic times. Even though the article stresses on
the use of “radical innovation” it does make some
salient points about the importance of creating a
culture for enabling adoption of innovation in an
organization. Even though the article talks about why
this is important, it does not go into any detailed
descriptions of how this can actually be implemented
in organizations.
http://www.dowjones.com/innovation/
“Technology Innovation Awards”
This website maintains a list of award recipients for
being the most technologically innovative companies.
WSJ presents companies with these awards year after
year. This is useful for the purpose of this article as it
alludes to the fact that while there is knowledge
available about how to rate the output of innovation,
there is not enough information about how to bring
about innovation itself.
xi
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2
008/id20081020_368485.htm
“Radical Service Innovation: Strategies on
the frontiers of service design demand a
blend of creativity and discipline. Here are
five steps to leverage positive results”
This article in Business Week describes the
steps one can take to bring about radical
service innovation in their companies.
However, the information described in this
article is very high level and does not talk
about the benefits of incremental innovation.
xii
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co
ntent/06_17/b3981401.htm
“The World's Most Innovative Companies:
Their creativity goes beyond products to
rewiring themselves. BusinessWeek and the
Boston Consulting Group rank the best.”
This is a release by Business Week and
contains a list of the most innovative
companies. In addition, it contains
descriptions of the things that these
companies have done to bring about
innovation within the company.
xiii
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main
/archives/2008/01/hp_cio_randy_mo.html
“HP CIO Randy Mott: Incremental IT 'Just
Doesn't Work'” By John Soat
This article describes how HP is
transforming its internal IT practices by
using radical innovation. The article also
takes a strong stand against incremental
technology innovation by terming it as a
“recipe for failure”. The article also talks
about some benefits of incremental
innovation – such as low risk and
improvement in existing infrastructure. It is
useful from for this paper as it shows that
the knowledge that is available in such
journals is more geared towards only a
certain point of view.
xiv
Information Week – November 10, 2008 –
“From Inkling to Innovation”
“From Idea to Innovation” by David
Greenfield
This article is very useful for the context of
this paper as it discusses experiments and
methods by which large corporations have
tried to tame innovation management. It also
discusses an impact assessment of managed
Page 16 of 16
incremental innovation and lays stress on the
different methods employed by different companies –
thus lending direct support to the chief premise of
this research paper (that incremental innovation is
difficult to manage and sustain due to lack of
standards and proven best practices).
xv
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives
/2007/08/the_roi_of_inno.html
“The ROI of Innovation” by Rob Preston
This article is a description of the fact that though
there is awareness amongst top management about
the usefulness of innovation, not much is being done
to support it because of lack of knowledge around
implementation of innovation and because of the
difficulty in predicting the outcome of
implementation of innovation.
xvi
http://www.innovationtools.com/PDF/idea-mgmt-
and-culture.pdf
“From Problems to Ideas through to Innovation”
This is a consultant white paper from Quocirca that
describes how idea generation can be managed and
what value it can add for an organization. Further, the
whitepaper also describes HOW idea management
can take place effectively in an organization. There is
an underlying theme of creating a culture of idea
generation in a company.
xvii
http://www.innovationtools.com/PDF/innovation-
roadmap.pdf
“Mastering Innovation” – The DeSai Group
This whitepaper describes that the burning issue
around innovation is institutionalizing it and fitting it
in a corporate framework. Also discussed is the
usefulness of harvesting internal innovation that
arises from a company’s own workforce.
xviii
“Assessment methodology to prioritize
knowledge management related activities to support
organizational excellence”
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentI
tem.do?contentType=Article&hdAction=lnkhtml&co
ntentId=843744
By Manfred Bornemann and Martin Sammer
“So far, a systematic and comprehensive assessment
tool to prioritize organizational development
activities, especially in the currently intensely
discussed domain of knowledge management is not
available in the literature”. This article also describes
a potential methodology which will address the
aforementioned problem.