Week 11: Reading Reflection (You Need an Innovation Strategy)

1). Senior leaders duty to implement innovation stood out to me the most because usually you hear of responsibility being spread throughout an organization. Putting the responsibility on top-level management assigns accountability and helps to ensure that senior leadership is actively engaged in the company. This was surprising to me because often you think of the new employees and interns being the most up to date with evolving trends, but instead, senior leaders are to set the overall tone.

2). The most confusing part for me was the supply-push versus demand-pull approaches. When someone is developing a business, I feel like it doesn’t necessarily neatly fall into one of these two categories, so clearly differentiating the two was a little complex to understand at first. He simplified the concept by going into detail and providing real world examples, such as Texas Instruments and the handheld calculator, that made it much easier to understand though.

3). My first question would be how a company or entrepreneur would know which of the four types of innovation to implement? Although he mentions that it should fit into the business strategy, assess the level of competition, examine the rate of technological change, and be a balance between each type, where would someone starting out in the industry begin? I think our course is designed more toward someone who is new to the field, so my question is aimed more at where someone would begin in developing the four areas. My second question would be in general, why do you believe innovation is so important? Obviously the article is extremely well developed and goes into a lot of detail, but my question would be to the author, in your opinion, why focus so much on just one area that so many people struggle with anyway?

4). I did not disagree with anything the author said. He had many excellent points about how each structure and process was interdependent, and he also noted that no one system was the magic answer for every company in every circumstance. I thought he was very practical in applying theory to real world practices and made many good points about innovation overall. In addition, his section on how innovation must create value for the customer was right on.