Innovativeness: Its antecedents and impact on business performance

House of Quality

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0737-6782.2004.00094.x

Value Creation by Toolkits for User Innovation and Design: The Case of the Watch Market

This paper builds on the principles and insights from improvisational theater to unpack the nature of collective improvisation and to consider what it takes to do it well and to innovate. Furthermore, we discuss the role of training in enhancing the incidence and effectiveness of improvisation. We propose that two common misconceptions about improvisation have hindered managers' understanding of how to develop the improvisational skill. First, the spontaneous facet of improvisation tends to be overemphasized, and second, there is a general assumption that improvisation always leads to positive performance. Our goal is to clear up the conceptual confusion about improvisation by laying out the various aspects of preparation that are required for effective improvisation. In our theoretical model, we delineate how the improvisational theater principles of "practice," "collaboration," "agree, accept, and add," "be present in the moment," and "draw on reincorporation and ready-mades" can be used to understand what it takes to improvise well in work teams and to create a context favoring these efforts. Our findings support a contingent view of the impact of improvisation on innovative performance. Improvisation is not inherently good or bad; however, improvisation has a positive effect on team innovation when combined with team and contextual moderating factors. We also provide initial evidence suggesting that the improvisational skill can be learned by organizational members through training. Our results shed light on the opportunities provided by training in improvisation and on the challenges of creating behavioral change going beyond the individual to the team and, ultimately, to the organization.

Improvisation and Innovative Performance in Teams

New products suffer from notoriously high failure rates. Many new products fail, not because of technical shortcomings, but because they simply have no market. Not surprisingly, then, studies have found that timely and reliable knowledge about customer preferences and requirements is the single most important area of information necessary for product development. To obtain such data, many organizations have made heavy ? but often unsuccessful ? investments in traditional market research.

The authors provide an alternative. Companies including Threadless, Yamaha and Ryohin Keikaku have begun to integrate customers into the innovation process by soliciting new product concepts directly from them. These firms also ask for commitments from customers to purchase a new product before the companies commence final development and manufacturing. This process ? called ?collective customer commitment?? can help companies avoid costly product failures. In essence, collective customer commitment enables firms to serve a market segment efficiently without first having to identify that segment, and it helps convert expenditures in market research directly into sales.

Reducing the risks of new product development

New Product Development From Past Research to Future Applications

This article describes a practical ‘top-down’ strategic framework to assist manufacturing-based SMEs to develop a degree of resilience when operating in turbulent business environments. The approach builds on the premise that resilience occurs as a result of the implementation of both operational and strategic capabilities. The framework is based on earlier work in the area of manufacturing agility implementation in SMEs developed by the authors, and involves the integration of operational agility tools with tools and approaches from the strategic development literature. With the inclusion of a multi-strategy assessment tool, SMEs are able to prioritise their capabilities to achieve a level of ‘strategic readiness’. This article demonstrates how the approach is applied using two case studies carried out within two traditional manufacturing-based SMEs.

The Role of Agile Strategic Capabilities in Achieving Resilience in Manufacturing-based Small Companies

This paper presents a framework for the implementation of agile manufacturing. The framework employs a bottom-up approach taking the company through three iterative implementation phases of robustness of operation, responsiveness to customers and proactive growth tactics. The framework incorporates a detailed assessment of the level of business environment turbulence and the impact of this turbulence on the enterprise. The results of this assessment are used to identify and customise an implantation plan as well as select the required tools and those measures of performance necessary to monitor the plans progress. This is carried while aligning any action to the company strategy.

Agile manufacturing framework and practice

It is increasingly more evident that mass customization (MC) has become a key strategy for those companies operating in markets where offering customers more choice is the only remaining differentiator. However, the impact on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is not always clear as the resources required to implement such a strategy in an SME often falls beyond what is considered to be acceptable risk. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of whether SMEs truly know how to effectively operate in an environment driven by customization. This paper introduces and demonstrates, through two case studies, how the principles of MC have been adopted by SMEs within the context of manufacturing agility and product flexibility. The paper explores the issues of product configuration, component similarity and the set of tools and measures of performance developed to steer the MC implementation process. The paper examines how the reuse of common components in product families can reduce internal variety. Coefficients that measure the similarity of products within a family are presented. These consider the factors of product structure, cost, volume and contribution. The "product-component matrix" is introduced to represent product families and calculate the similarity coefficients

How Small and Medium Enterprises Effectively Participate in the Mass Customization Game

Purpose – To examine the application of the principles of “agile manufacturing” to marketing strategy, planning and management, in the context of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).Design/methodology/approach – Uses the case‐study method to test the development and deployment of “agile marketing” by applying the marketing techniques normally practised only by larger companies, within the “hard” and “soft” constraints imposed by one small company's managerial attitudes, corporate resources and time horizons. The host company was a UK supplier of technological products to other manufacturers; it had no history of marketing. The focus of the study was on the third stage of the agility framework: how a proactive marketing approach can be used to generate new custom.Findings – “Agile marketing” innovations released latent capacity, and a strategic marketing plan was devised to win new custom. After follow‐up, four new customers had been recruited, and the potential for developing long‐term relations wit...

Jenny Poolton

Papers

New Product Development From Past Research to Future Applications

The Role of Agile Strategic Capabilities in Achieving Resilience in Manufacturing-based Small Companies

Agile manufacturing framework and practice

How Small and Medium Enterprises Effectively Participate in the Mass Customization Game

Agile marketing for the manufacturing‐based SME