Essay On Innovation

Innovation Definitions:

The increased awareness of innovation in both organizational context and academical area has led to the incremental attention of literature on the subject of innovation which generated a different and multiple definitions of this concept from diverse perspectives and contexts. Indeed, innovation generally refers to the creation and generation of new ideas, processes products, services and new ways of marketing or improving existing ones in order to gain added-value, obtain competitive advantage and reaching more effectiveness, efficiency and productivity to optimize the organizational performance. Innovation has been defined from different perspectives and studied in many disciplines (Damanpour and Schneider, 2006).

This definition makes a distinction between new and improved elements that are affected by innovation which drive the attention to the fact that innovation is not exclusively the creation of something extremely new from nothing but include also modification and improvement of quality, performance, design...However, the definition highlight the managerial side of innovation which involve the renewal and reconstitution of process and method of works that are related to the internally and externally organizational environment and inspiring new way of doing business and management of the interactions and relations with different actors including (competitors, customers, suppliers, financial institution, the state…). Therefore, this definition highlights the typology of innovation (which will be discussed profoundly in the following section) and classifies it into four types involving (product, process, marketing and organizational)

Innovation is suggested to be equal to creativity, invention, conception and exploitation innovation (Roberts, 1988; O’Sullivan and Dooley, 2009; Trott, 2012). This perception focuses on the technical, theoretical and commercial aspect of innovation.

Applied to the individual behavioural level, Innovation could be defined as “all individual actions directed at the generation, introduction and application of beneficial novelty at any organization level.” (De Jong and Kemp, 2003). The authors highlight the importance of human resources at the generation of ideas and creation of the novelty. Also, they reveal that innovation cannot be an automated process that is independent from human interaction.

Acs and Audretsch (1988) describe innovation as a process that starts from invention proceeded by the development to introduce new product and services or processes to the market as a result. In fact, the innovation process could be evolved to be more complex and