Innovation Adaptation

Overview

On this page, we will discuss:

• Beyond Job Crafting - Innovation Adaptation
• Ladder of Opportunities
• What Is Innovation Adaptation?
• Intellectual Property Considerations

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Beyond Job Crafting - Innovation Adaptation

Within the scope of your co-op work term, we will be focusing on innovation within the scope of job crafting; however, in your future careers where you will have more responsibility and a greater sphere of influence, understanding the full scope of workplace innovation will be helpful. You may also encounter evidence of this from other employees in your co-op workplaces.

Encouraging and supporting employees' creativity and innovative ideas contributes to innovation capability.

As we noted in the previous sections, an individual's engagement with creativity and innovation in the workplace can take many forms. Initially, you can be creative and craft your own best way to contribute value (e.g., job crafting). When you graduate and are working permanently in a role, you will become more comfortable with innovation activities, and you might pursue your own intrapreneurial ventures within your workplace - entrepreneurial ventures developed and launched within an organization (also known as "corporate entrepreneurship").

There are other forms of engagement between these two end points (job crafting and corporate entrepreneurship) with different degrees of uncertainty and different resource requirements, such as time needed to explore fully an innovation opportunity or possibility. This journey is reflected in the Ladder of Opportunities.

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Ladder of Opportunities

The Ladder of Opportunities illustrates a set of workplace innovation scenarios with their varying levels of resources needed, uncertainties to be addressed, and potential impacts that could be achieved (Baregheh & Carey, 2021).

Organizations can develop innovation capability by encouraging creativity, idea generation, and product and process innovations, creating the potential for employees to become agents of change (Saunila & Ukko, 2012). These tactics can become various forms of employee workplace innovation.

However, the efforts to develop innovation capability can be limited based on the availability of resources and the associated complexity and uncertainty of the project. This, in turn, is an indication of the impact and scope of change (Tidd & Bessant, 2020).

It is, therefore, necessary to focus on employee workplace innovation within the boundaries of the required resources and an organization's capacity to make resources available. More specifically, organizational resources may include human, tools, technology, and capital, as well the associated level of risk. The greater number and value of the resources required, and the higher or more threatening the risks involved, the larger the potential scope and impact on the organization. Different organizations and leaders will have different thresholds for using resources and taking risks.

As innovation projects become more complicated, they may require broader organizational support. In that case, bureaucracy can be an impediment to creativity and innovation, which is often the reason why large organizations lag behind startups and smaller organizations which can, by design, be nimbler and more adaptive.

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What Is Innovation Adaptation?

In the first step of our Ladder of Opportunities, we considered job crafting. Now we will move a step up and focus on innovation adaptation, where employees will scan their internal/external environment to identify any adaptation opportunities to be implemented in their workplace. This may be done in response to needs such as:

• improving performance,
• introducing new products, or
• solving an operational problem.

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The process of innovation adaptation should be familiar, as it is the basis for the Sustainability Innovation Challenge you completed in PD3. For many of you, the challenge and related solution proposed were adaptations of already existing technologies, processes, ideas, etc. The proposal you drafted in PD4 would be one way of advocating for and actioning your innovation adaptation idea in a real workplace.

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Intellectual Property Considerations

Organizations scan the market on a regular basis to identify what their competitors are working on to stay one step ahead of them. What we often observe is that one organization will introduce a radical innovation and other organizations will follow suit and copy/adapt the idea with some variations. However, organizations must ensure that they are not violating copyright or patent laws as they differentiate or iterate on other organizations' innovations.

For example, iRobot's Roomba Links to an external site., a robot vacuum, was previously introduced by Electrolux and Dyson but unsuccessfully. Since Roomba's introduction, many other companies have introduced robotic vacuums differing in various attributes such as price point or functionality. Nevertheless, iRobot has kept its market leadership over the years.

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References

Baregheh, A., & Carey, T. (2021, July 27). "Every employee” engagement with workplace innovation: A professional development ladder. WINCan. https://www.wincan.ca/blog/2021/11/27/every-employee-engagement-with-workplace-innovation-a-professional-development-ladder Links to an external site.  

Baregheh, A., & Carey, T. (2022). Workplace innovation: Innovation adaptation. eCampusOntario Pressbooks. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/workplaceinnovation2022/chapter/innovation-adaptation/ Links to an external site. 

Saunila, M., & Ukko, J. (2012), A conceptual framework for the measurement of innovation capability and its effects. Baltic Journal of Management, 7(4), 355-375. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465261211272139 Links to an external site. 

Tidd, J., & Bessant, J. R. (2020). Managing innovation: integrating technological, market and organizational change. John Wiley & Sons.