The Innovation Value Chain By Hansen And Birkinshaw

In to the article “The Innovation Value Chain”, Hansen and Birkinshaw discussed how the innovation challenges, in reality, are different from one company to another, and they indicated that “ there is no universal solution for organizations wanting to improve their ability to generate, develop, and disseminate new ideas.” In fact, I think this is the truth because organizations are different in the size, capacities, management systems, culture, and to what extend employees’ skills. Therefore, good solutions for one company’s challenges not necessary work for another one even if they are at the same level, and, sometimes in this same company, a successful solution that works for one situation might be wasteful or even harmful. In the article,

For example, if a company has not difficulties in generating ideas from its creative employees, and they have good new ideas for new products, but it did not have a process for selecting best ideas and remove the others. The creative employees became more frustrated seeing their creative talents and brainstorm efforts not developed to get those good ideas to market, consequently, will make the relationship between creative employees and managers worse, and these employees will eventually leave the company to find a better innovative place to

But the truth, according to the authors’ thoughts, is that managers were strengthening on one part which coursed debilitate the other parts of the chain, as a result, weaken the company’s overall innovation capabilities.

Therefore, my company needs to consider the following implication to be better in innovation: 1) managers should take the end-to-end view of all the innovation efforts in the company to determine where are the problems in the innovation process. 2) We need to fix the poor conversion by implementing a formal system to manage the ideas flow, which will improve the company’s ability to make a good screening and selecting of good ideas. 3) The management is very afraid of risk on moving forward and very strict in funding criteria that cause a lot of shutting down to most of the ideas, and for that reason, we need to have a good mechanism for funding the new ideas.

The article has done a good job in demonstrating how using the approach of innovation value chain help managers to identify the companies’ innovation challenges and, as a result, be more selective about innovation tools and improve the companies’ innovation