Innovation Fundamentals

Quantitative and Qualitative Techniques

Adedeji B. Badiru, Gary Lamont

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000423129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

The book uses a systems-based approach to show how innovation is pervasive in all facets of endeavors, including business, industrial, government, the military, and even academia. It presents chapters that provide techniques and methodologies for achieving the transfer of science and technology assets for innovation applications.

By introducing Innovation, the book and offers different viewpoints, both qualitative and quantitative. It includes the role that systems can play and discusses approaches along technical and process issues. There is a showcase of innovation applications, and coverage on how to manage innovation individually as well as within a team and it also includes how to develop, manage, and sustain innovation in various organizations. Open-ended questions and exercises are included at the end of chapters with no need for a solutions manual.

Written for the advance-level textbook market as well as for the professional reader, it targets those within the engineering, business, and management fields.

1

Systems Thinking for Innovation

INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMS THINKING FOR INNOVATION

The thoughts, perspectives, and ideas about innovation permeate any modern society. Sustainable innovation is systems-based. Systems thinking leads to innovation. Inasmuch as it is a systems world these days, the pursuit of innovation is a worldwide phenomenon. Innovation has become “le mot du jour” (word of the day) in everyone's lexicon nowadays. In every corner of business, industry, government, academia, and the military, everyone is singing the praises of innovation. Unfortunately, not many fully understand, appreciate, or recognize all the nuances associated with innovation. Such nuances may include technological, management, organizational, cultural, budgetary, workforce, political, and social underpinnings of innovation. Some people hear the word innovation and they immediately jump to the conclusion that it is a word signifying a panacea of all the operational ills that afflict organizations.

In literary parlance, innovation is defined as “the process or action of innovating.” However, digging deeper, what is “innovating?” In dictionary terms, innovation is broadly defined as “getting things done through a new combination of actions and processes.” So, innovation can occur in any sphere of human endeavor. It could be in the home, in the market, in production systems, in management processes, in supply chains, in the delivery of education, in political machination, in construction, and so on. For this reason, for the purpose of this book, we advocate that innovation should be defined on the basis of its targeted terms of use.

A generic definition of innovation, intended to fit all uses, will certainly miss the road and doomed to fail. Innovation doesn’t have to be esoteric or technologically driven. Innovation's goal should be to get things done better than they had been done before. If an effort is already at its limit of improvement possibility, maybe innovation is not even applicable. In this context, if the human physiology has been improving, through evolution and/or adaptation over the ages, can we then conclude that nature is, inherently, innovative? If we view innovation as a deliberate act of doing something better, should we then discount human's natural improvement as not being due to innovation? Followers of innovation should have an open mind about innovation and possible limitations on its applicability.

DIVERSE LITERATURE ON INNOVATION

We almost always think of innovation in terms of highly technical science and tech (S&T) areas, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, resilience, information technology, aerial systems, cloud computing technologies, and so on. Actually, innovation goes beyond those technologically oriented and focused topics. Beyond the technicalities of innovation, for innovation to take hold in any pursuit, we must recognize the attendant policies, procedures, implementation strategies, and sustainment approaches. To reap the rewards of innovation, an organization must facilitate liaising efforts across the organization to align and integrate pockets of activities throughout the organization. This is easier said than done.

There is extensive collection of books on the topic of innovation in the market. The uniqueness of this book is related to its being one of the few books written specifically as a textbook on innovation, with a primary focus on the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) behind innovation. As such, the contents and orientation may be too technical in comparison to the narrative approach found in many of the existing books. This section provides a summary of selected books on innovation.

Kelley (2016) presents an extensive narrative addressing the various management and philosophical aspects of pursuing innovation. Organizational latency is addressed in the book as well as issues such as innovation from the top, start-up mode of innovation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, overcoming barriers, and winging innovation. Drucker (1985) demonstrates that the literary coverage of innovation as a topic of business survival has been around a long time. The book highlights pertinent topics, including entrepreneurial economy, systematic entrepreneurship, purposeful innovation, entrepreneurial management, and business principles of innovation. This is a good reference for those approaching innovation from the business side of the consideration. Lockwood and Papke (2018) address innovation from a change perspective. The title of the book is expressive of its contents, which include design thinking, innovation culture, communication, leadership alignment, and tackling the right problems. Degraff and Degraff (2017) outline what they present as innovation code for assessing the creativity of individuals to be successful with innovation. A sort of a personality assessment process, innovation code looks at how conflict can be leveraged to advance innovation. It is defined by the authors as a sense-making tool to identify, differentiate, and categorize the dominant worldviews when groups of people come together to pursue innovation. The book uses comparative tables to map individual and group views over people characteristics of being an artist, an engineer, a sage, and an athlete. The point here is to recognize the possible conflicting views of people, who are expected to come together to innovate. Creativity is the engine that drives innovation. Some sources of creativity include the following:

• Natural creativity
• Learned creativity
• Observed creativity
• Mandated creativity
• Conscripted creativity
• Legislated creativity
• Practiced creativity

Rogers (2003) describes several cases stretching over four decades on instances of not quickly adopting and implementing innovation, even where it appears the innovation is worthwhile and could be profitable. The case made by the book is the necessity to speed up the diffusion (spread, dispersion, dispersal, distribution, circulation, dissemination, sharing, transfer, transmission, and flow) of innovations. The impediments to diffusion could be organizational and market issues, among others. In HBR's 10 Must Reads (Drucker 2013), ten contributors present diverse views on innovation. Topics addressed include innovation catalysts, innovation wars, myths of product development, discovery-driven planning, General Electric's innovation disruption, customer-centered innovation map, innovation traps, innovation killers, worthwhileness of innovation, and the discipline of innovation.

Verganti (2009) focuses on the application of management principles to manage innovations that customers do not expect, but that they, eventually, love. This is a sort of serendipity innovation. The title of the book may be misleading to those who, by default, expect design to be about product styling or conceptualization. A key human resource lesson advanced by the book is that managers are people, who were themselves managed, before becoming managers. Similarly, designers are people before becoming designers. Scholars are people before being scholars. The point is that the people aspect is inherent in everyone. Thus, the expectation for innovation must recognize that people are still people, with inherent human traits. Badiru and Barlow (2019) present a collection of chapters under the theme of defense innovation guidelines, strategies, and techniques. The approach uses an integrated view of people, technology, and process. Topics covered include innovation for national defense, workforce development, building resilient systems, innovative human-systems integration, innovation in defense manufacturing, innovation readiness, innovations for defense acquisition reform, and innovation project management. Badiru (2020) focuses on the application of a systems approach to innovation. Specific techniques introduced in this book include the umbrella model for innovation and the DEJI systems model for innovation design, evaluation, justification, and integration.

Fagerberg et al (2013) contain a voluminous collection of edited innovation-themed chapters, the contents of which include innovation processes, organizational innovation, measuring innovation, network of innovators, universities in national innovation systems, innovation and intellectual property, globalization of innovation, innovation over time, innovation in low-tech industries, innovation in services, innovation and economic growth, innovation and employment, competitiveness through innovation, and innovation policy. Voehl et al (2019) present a multi-chapter volume on topics ranging from organizational preparation for innovation, promoting innovation communication, personal creativity, innovation master plan, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1 Systems Thinking for Innovation
• Chapter 2 Fundamentals of Innovation: Quantitative and Qualitative Techniques
• Chapter 3 Set-Theoretic Systems for Innovation
• Chapter 4 Half-life of Innovation Using Learning Curves
• Chapter 5 Innovation Economic Analysis
• Chapter 6 Human-Systems Integration for Innovation
• Chapter 7 Innovation through Industrial Engineering Techniques
• Chapter 8 Managing Innovation Projects
• Chapter 9 Utility Modeling for Innovation
• Chapter 10 Innovation Workforce Development and Management
• Appendix: Technical Conversion Factors
• Index