Assessing Innovation

Question 1

What is innovation?

Answer 1

Innovation occurs when a new idea is brought to fruition and turned into a good or service that can be used and/or sold.

Question 2

What are the pressures for innovation?

Answer 2

External:
- PEST-C

Internal:
- employees eager to experiment and try out new ideas

Question 3

How can managers create an environment that encourages innovation?

Answer 3

Create an environment where:
- It is acceptable to fail

• There is funding available for experimentation and for trying new things
• It is good to share skills, ideas, experiences, and challenge each other

Question 4

What are the ways of becoming an innovative organisation?

Answer 4

• Change working environment
• Leadership values, styles, and qualities
• Listening
• Kaizen groups
• Intrapreneurship
• Benchmarking

Question 5

What is Kaizen?

Answer 5

Kaizen refers to a process of continuous improvement. This is a management approach in which employees regularly look for small improvements in the way they do their work.

Question 6

What is the Kaizen process?

Answer 6

• Standardised work
• Make problems visible
• Develop counter-measure
• Determine route cause
• Hypothesise solution
• Test hypothesis
• Implement solution

Question 7

What is intrapreneurship?

Answer 7

Intrapreneurship occurs when individuals come up with ideas within their division, department, team or business unit and follow them through.

Question 8

What is benchmarking?

Answer 8

Benchmarking occurs when a business tries to match the approach and success of a particular process that is used by another organisation

Question 9

What can a business get intellectual property protection for?

Answer 9

• The names of your products or brands
• Inventions
• The design or look of your products
• Things that are written, made or produced

Question 10

What types of intellectual property protection is there?

Answer 10

• Copyright
• Trademarks
• Patents
• Design rights
• Registered design

Question 11

What does copyright protect?

Answer 11

• Literary works
• Art
• Photography
• Films
• Music
• Web content
• Sound recordings

Question 12

How to gain copyright protection?

Answer 12

Automatic right

Question 13

What do trademarks protect

Answer 13

Product names, logos, jingles

Question 14

How can trademark protection be gained?

Answer 14

Needs to be registered

Question 15

What do patents protect and how is it gained?

Answer 15

Inventions and products, tools, medicines

Needs to be registered

Question 16

What do design right protect and how is protection gained?

Answer 16

Shapes of objects

Automatic right

Question 17

What do registered designs protect and how is it gained?

Answer 17

Appearance of a product, including shape, packaging, patterns, colours, decoration.

Needs to be registered

Question 18

What is disruptive innovation?

Answer 18

Disruptive innovation describes innovations that create new markets by discovering new groups of consumers.

Question 19

What functional areas can innovation impact?

Answer 19

Human resources
- way in which employees are managed and rewarded must encourage them to bring ideas forward and share them

Finance
- money need to be made available for R&D

Marketing
- marketing research may stimulate innovation

Operations
- project management to develop new products, new skills and techniques to develop idea.