Which of the following practices is important for establishing innovation-driven organizations?

Due to the increase in competitive intensity across industries, the accelerated pace of business and the globalized nature of many organizations, top management is constantly pressured to deliver ever more challenging growth targets.  From our experience, companies continue to struggle in trying to balance the tensions that exist between defending the existing and dominant positions (their core business) and creating new profitable growth through new business developments and innovations. 

Truly innovative companies are able to deliver a consistent stream of market successes via successful businesses and products or improved processes that continuously translate market successes into economic value that enhances competitive advantage and sustains growth. This achieves the best “bang for the buck,” that maximizes the returns of invested resources across their growth portfolio. 

So, what are the best practices that successful high performance companies have in common?  There are many ways to address this question.   One initial answer came from a study from the American Productivity Quality Center (ASQ); a survey of 600 CEOs in the manufacturing, service, healthcare and education sectors revealed that innovative organizations have similarities in strategic approach and processes. 

Organizations that deliver superior productivity and returns have the following 7 practices: 

1. They are customer focused: they understand that they exist to deliver real value to their customers, therefore their decisions, processes are conceived and implemented to identify customer needs and requirements and infuse their input throughout their growth processes.

2.They execute heavy front-end homework before development begins: high performing companies ask the right and difficult questions way before the major work and investment is committed. By doing the proper due process early, they can quickly eliminate less attractive options and focus only on those that have the potential to impact the business positively.

3.Involve users early and often: their solutions development approach includes spiral development-loops with users throughout the process. This guarantees that customer input is factored into key decisions early on and is adjusted across the development process.

4.Effective team management for growth: these organizations have holistic and effective cross-functional teams. They have clearly assigned charters, proper team composition and efficient team dynamics, including: communication and decision-making. Also, there is clear alignment between each teams goals and the overall strategic direction of the organization.

5.Tracking of relevant metrics: they track key metrics, have accountable teams, and produce profit/loss reports for continuous learning.

6. Strong growth portfolio management focus: they understand companies have very limited time, resources and people so they have effective decisions frameworks and supporting systems to enable, identify, articulate, document and prioritize key growth options.

7. Custom Stage-Gate process that adapts to their culture and operations: they usually have lean, scalable and adaptable processes to improve decisions making and accelerate time to make while keeping the rigor required to deliver results and manage risk.

Clearly, becoming a high performance innovation-driven organization is part of a continuous improvement process. In our practice, we work side-by-side with top management in understanding the current state of their growth and innovation capabilities by going even deeper and assessing their performance in key multiple areas such as: (1) strategy focus, (2) competitive context (3) customer centricity, (4) culture, leadership and Language, (5) support systems and tools, (6) team management practices, (7) management process and metrics and (8) organization and structure. 

A quick but thoughtful evaluation of these areas can help you and your teams not only identify gaps and articulate areas of opportunity, but most importantly create effective action plans and transformation roadmaps towards becoming a truly high performance innovation-driven organization.

Peter Drucker's four major developments that explain the rising influence of entrepreneurship.

1. The rapid evolution of knowledge and technology
promoted the development of high-tech
entrepreneurial start-ups.

2. Demographic trends such as two-wage-earner
families, continuing education of adults, and the
aging population added fuel to the proliferation of
newly developing ventures.

3. The venture capital market became an effective
funding mechanism for entrepreneurial ventures.

4. American industry began to learn how to manage
entrepreneurship.

Corporate entrepreneurship

Is a process that can facilitate efforts to innovate and can help firms cope with the competitive realities of world markets.

The need of corporate entrepreneurship as a response to:

1. The rapidly growing number of new, sophisticated
competitors.

2. A sense of distrust in the traditional methods of
corporate management.

3. An exodus of some of the best and brightest people
from corporations to become small-business
entrepreneurs.

Five important practices for establishing innovation-driven organizations follow

(Corporate Innovation Philosophy)

1. Set explicit innovation goals.
2. Create a system of feedback and positive
reinforcement.
3. Emphasize individual responsibility.
4. Provide rewards for innovative ideas
5. Do not punish failures.

Advantages of developing a corporate entrepreneurial philosophy:

- often leads to the development of new products and
services, helping the organization expand and grow.

- creates a workforce that can help the enterprise
maintain its competitive posture.

- It promotes a climate conductive to high achievers
and helps the enterprise motivate and keep its best
people.

Their commonality the adding of new business to the corporation. Can be accomplished through three implementation modes.
o Internal corporate venturing
o Cooperative corporate venturing
o External corporate venturing

Strategic entrepreneurship:

Their commonality the exhibition of large-scale or otherwise highly consequential innovations that are adopted in the firm’s pursuit of competitive advantage.

These innovations may or may not result in new businesses for the corporation.

Factors in large corporations that have exhibited successful innovations:

- Atmosphere and vision.
- Orientation to the market.
- Small, flat organizations
- Multiple approaches.
- Interactive learning.
- Skunk Works

Corporate Entrepreneurship Strategy

a vision-directed, organization-wide reliance on entrepreneurial behavior that purposefully and continuously rejuvenates the organization and shapes the scope of its operations through the recognition and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunity.

The five critical steps of a corporate entrepreneurship strategy are:

1) Developing the vision
2) Encouraging innovation
3) Structuring for an entrepreneurial climate
4) Preparing individual managers for corporate
innovation
5) Developing venture teams

Collective entrepreneurship

individual skills are integrated into a group, this collective capacity to innovate becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

What are the 4 models of corporate entrepreneurship?

Together the two dimensions generate a matrix with four dominant models: opportunist, enabler, advocate and producer.

Which of the following would not occur in the second stage of establishing corporate entrepreneurship in an Organisation?

Which of the following would not occur in the second stage of establishing corporate entrepreneurship in an organization? Identify an evaluation system for involved employees.

Which school of thoughts holds that the group affects or eliminates certain factors that project the individual into an entrepreneurial venture?

Displacement school of thought: This perspective focuses on group phenomena, suggesting that the group affects or eliminates certain factors that project the individual into an entrepreneurial venture.

How does an entrepreneur and business owner differ in terms of vision for the development and growth?

Entrepreneurs tend to be classified as those who take on high-growth, high-risk innovations while small business owners oversee an established business with an established product and customer base. Successful entrepreneurs are seen as a driving force in the modern economy.