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The main difference between innovation and entrepreneurship is that innovation involves
introducing something new. This can be a new business model, product, idea, or service. On the
other hand, entrepreneurship involves turning a great idea into a business opportunity
Innovation in Entrepreneurship can open the doors of various opportunities by helping the
business to keep up with the current trends.
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Innovation needs(combination of creativity & management)
Creation needs(technical competence)
Management needs((technical affinity)
Importance of innovation
innovation is basically the replacement or improvement of something. Innovation is the particular
instrument of entrepreneurs with the help of which an individual exploits the changes as a chance
for a different business. An Innovative Entrepreneur is one who has the ability to tackle to produce
innovative products to meet the market's demands and trends. Innovation in Entrepreneur plays a
role in many ways like in:
1. Creative Development
Innovation enhances the nature, creativity, and design thinking process of a brand. A new business
can attain the height of success by learning the steps of creativeness. Innovation in Entrepreneurship
can open the doors of various opportunities by helping the business to keep up with the current
trends.
2. Persistent Improvement
Innovation gives organizational durability when you are making continual improvements. A good
entrepreneur will realize the importance of innovation, which will help in increasing the creativity
of business.
What are the 4 steps in JIT process? Read on for our four steps to success.
Step 1: Ensure plant efficiency. Complete plant efficiency is at the core of JIT manufacturing. ...
Step 2: Maintain quality control. Effective traceability methods are vital for ensuring a JIT production
process. ...
Step 3: choose the right equipment. ...
Step 4: Secure your supply chain.
Example of A just-in-time (JIT) inventory system is a management strategy that has a company receive
goods as close as possible to when they are actually needed. So, if a car assembly plant needs to install
airbags, it does not keep a stock of airbags on its shelves but receives them as those cars come onto the
assembly line
Advantages of JIT Rather than producing goods and supplying customers from stock,
JIT processes focus on producing exactly the amount you need at exactly the time your
customers need it.
Cash Flow Management. Just-in-time inventory helps you to manage cash flow. ...
Reduces Clutter and Waste. Just-in-time inventory reduces the clutter that is an inevitable result
of keeping too much stock on hand. ...
Disadvantage:
Customer focus,
employee involvement,
integrated system,
process-centric approach,
systematic flow,
continual efforts,
fact-based decision-making, and
Relationship management
American statistician Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who proposed sampling-based quality inspection
through his Statistical Quality Control theory, first conceptualized the TQM strategy. He also contributed
toward introducing quality control in the quality management measures of the Japanese manufacturers
in the 1950s post-World War Second. It became popularized as a total quality management concept in
the later years.
TQM enables organizations to align their workforce with the manufacturing processes to find and
eliminate errors to improve the overall quality of their outputs. In doing so, the top management,
middle management, and executives assess the end products from every aspect and devise quality
production plans accordingly. To prevent or eliminate errors caused by human mistake or faulty system,
they take various measures, such as:
#1 – Customer Focus
Every organization strives to serve only one purpose, i.e., customer satisfaction through quality products
and services. Hence, the first among the total quality management principles is customer focus. It means
the end product must meet the demands and needs of the customers.
#2 – Employee Involvement
When implementing TQM, organizations need to create an environment where their employees will feel
empowered. They, along with management, become responsible for assessing the quality of the
products and services at their levels. Here, organizational communication plays a vital role in boosting
employee morale.
#3 – Integrated System
Having an integrated system is a must for an organization to implement a TQM strategy across its
business processes. Therefore, incorporating quality standards like ISO 9000 standards could help
produce quality products and services. It will lead to meeting or exceeding consumer expectations as
well.
#4 – Process-Centric Approach
A product or service reaches the market after passing through different processes. It means it is
monitored and assessed at each production level and not only at the final stage. Process-led thinking is a
sign of effective TQM.
#5 – Systematic Flow
TQM is all about strategic planning to achieve quality excellence and business objectives. Thus,
considering a systemic flow would ensure the products and services are passing through every stage in
the quality production process.
#6 – Continual Efforts
Quality improvement should be a continuous process. Once done and then left would only mean gradual
deterioration in the manufacturing standards. For the TQM approach to prove effective, people at every
level need to be alert in being regular with quality checking.
#7 – Factual Decision-Making
The organization must make fact-based decisions because every employee is participating in the quality
evaluation processes. Analyzing the organizational performance using performance data, such as sales,
profit, and customer retention could result in more accurate decision-making.
#8 – Relationship Management
A well-maintained relation with stakeholders like customers and employees will ensure proper quality
control procedures and honest feedback. With TQM, organizations can establish effective
communication with all of them and implement result-oriented changes.
Benefits of TQM
1. Radical innovation
As the name suggests, a radical innovation really changes the circumstances of a brand, whether in
terms of market or of business dynamics.
It can occur due to a complete change in a company's positioning, work method, processes, services, and
products offered, or how it relates to customers.
An example of radical innovation would be Apple's iPhone. When it was released, smartphones already
existed, but Apple included features that changed the market and made it more popular.
2. Incremental innovation
Another type of innovation is incremental innovation. It adds new features to a product, brand, or
production methods without promoting a very drastic change.
It's usually an evolution of an innovation already implemented by the brand that complements and
offers improvements, be it to employees, customers, or features of a business.
An example of incremental innovation is Gmail, which was created with the purpose of sending emails
quickly – but over time, different features were added to improve the customer experience and make it
more useful and competitive.
3. Disruptive innovation
Technological and behavioral changes have favored the emergence of disruptive innovation in recent
decades.
This type of innovation follows the market more than a specific brand, product, or service. It can be
leveraged by something a company has offered and, as a result, made their name, but, in general, it's
a scalable change that reaches many people at the same time.
Examples of disruptive innovation include Netflix, as the market used to rely on companies like
Blockbuster for movies and TV series. Netflix started offering DVD-by-mail rental services but decided
to innovate. It started offering video streaming services through a monthly subscription and, in doing so,
drove Blockbuster out of the market. In addition to being innovative, this also gave Netflix a predictable
monthly revenue.
Examples of innovation
Now that you know the types of innovation, we will show some examples so that you understand the
topic in practice. Let's begin!
Product innovation
Easily noticed, product innovation actually brings something new to the market. Television, for example,
was something innovative when it was invented, bringing image, sound, and entertainment into people's
houses.
It was a radical innovation that, with acceptance of the public, became disruptive and over time began
to rely on incremental innovation. The whole world followed the release of different kinds of TV: color,
cable, flat-screen, and, today, smart TV.
Service innovation
A visible example of service innovation is food delivery. For a long time, in order to eat something from a
restaurant, customers needed to walk into the place or order takeout.
That's when the market innovated and offered delivery service so that customers could order whatever
they wanted with just a phone call. Over time, it became possible to order food on websites, and now we
can order food on mobile apps at our fingertips.
Innovation in production processes
Here it is interesting to highlight environmental awareness. Many cosmetic brands, for example,
innovate by implementing cruelty-free processes that don’t involve animals.
Innovation in business model
Innovation in the business model is very common in startups. A simple example would be marketplaces.
Virtual stores like Amazon mediate between buyers and sellers.
Another example would be virtual banks. Today, there are many financial institutions with no physical
facilities for customer service and whose transactions are all performed online.
Technological innovation
Technological innovation is the most evident kind of innovation. The advance of technology brings about
many opportunities. Thinking back a few centuries, the Industrial Revolution springs to mind as a good
example, since it changed production methods in companies, work methods, and even workers’ lives.
In a modern context, though, the primary examples are the internet and smartphones, which
revolutionized not only products and services, but also society's behavior.
Technological innovation, as we see in the case of Industry 4.0 technologies, enables us to take steps
that would otherwise be unachievable with human power alone.
Logistical innovation
For a long time, it would take up to a month to receive a letter by mail. For international products, it
would take an average of three months. To change this, companies and distributors innovated in
logistics, creating storage points and strategic distribution centers. Today, there are apps to hire delivery
services and even delivery drones!
Marketing innovation
Ways of acquiring new customers have evolved, and we're seeing more and more
innovations in marketing. Sometimes, the way you advertise can be innovative. With the creation of
social media, for example, lots of brands innovated by advertising on those platforms instead of
newspapers and television.
Organizational innovation
Organizational innovation brings several other kinds of innovation. They concern structural changes
and practices that improve productivity, services, products, and processes.
Home offices are an example of organizational innovation, as are management software, customer service
chatbots, and trainee programs in which employees get to know all departments of a company before
actually working in one of them.
Generation of new ideas: What are the opportunities in the field? What hasn't been done yet and would
actually change a product, service, or company?
Evaluation: What's necessary to put this into practice, is it possible, and how do you make it viable?
Experimentation: It's vital to test your ideas and identify what really works and what needs to be
improved.
Marketing: Has it reached the sweet spot? It's time to offer to customers what before was just an internal
project.
Follow-up: Keeping track of what has been implemented is important to understand public acceptance,
audience, and strategy. To do that, feedback is essential.
All stages need to be based on technology. This makes it possible to speed up processes and document
versions prior to the innovation, monitor results, compare versions, test, and assess overall performance.
Innovation is a complex process with many different stages and inherent risks. It will often
require an investment of time and money before any positive effects become visible.
Risks of innovation
You can face several types of innovation risks in your business. Risks can be:
As part of any innovation process, you should strive to understand, evaluate and manage risk.
To reduce the risks, you can consider the following:
Although these may be difficult to quantify, you can still protect them. You should assess what
your assets may be and how you can protect them. Read more about protecting intellectual
property.
Four such areas of opportunity exist within a company or industry: unexpected occurrences,
incongruities, process needs, and industry and market changes.
Three additional sources of opportunity exist outside a company in its social and intellectual
environment: demographic changes, changes in perception, and new knowledge.
True, these sources overlap, different as they may be in the nature of their risk, difficulty, and
complexity, and the potential for innovation may well lie in more than one area at a time. But together,
they account for the great majority of all innovation opportunities.
1. Unexpected Occurrences
The unexpected failure may be an equally important source of innovation opportunities. Everyone
knows about the Ford Edsel as the biggest new-car failure in automotive history. What very few people
seem to know, however, is that the Edsel’s failure was the foundation for much of the company’s later
success. Ford planned the Edsel, the most carefully designed car to that point in American automotive
history, to give the company a full product line with which to compete with General Motors. When it
bombed, despite all the planning, market research, and design that had gone into it, Ford realized that
something was happening in the automobile market that ran counter to the basic assumptions on which
GM and everyone else had been designing and marketing cars. No longer was the market segmented
primarily by income groups; the new principle of segmentation was what we now call “lifestyles.” Ford’s
response was the Mustang, a car that gave the company a distinct personality and reestablished it as an
industry leader.
This is a caricature, to be sure, but it illustrates the attitude managers often take to the unexpected: “It
should not have happened.” Corporate reporting systems further ingrain this reaction, for they draw
attention away from unanticipated possibilities. The typical monthly or quarterly report has on its first
page a list of problems—that is, the areas where results fall short of expectations. Such information is
needed, of course, to help prevent deterioration of performance. But it also suppresses the recognition
of new opportunities. The first acknowledgment of a possible opportunity usually applies to an area in
which a company does better than budgeted. Thus genuinely entrepreneurial businesses have two “first
pages”—a problem page and an opportunity page—and managers spend equal time on both.
2. Incongruities
An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what 'ought' to be, or between what
is and what everybody assumes it to be. We may not understand the reason for it; indeed, we often
cannot figure it out. Still, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportunity to innovate.
An example of an incongruity between perceived expectations and actual customer expectations could
be when many companies were trying to create smaller MP3 players with more functionality and
storage. People were not necessarily after the increased specification of the MP3 player product though
as now people have everything in their mobile phones
An incongruity between expectations and results can also open up possibilities for innovation. For 50
years after the turn of the century, shipbuilders and shipping companies worked hard both to make
ships faster and to lower their fuel consumption. Even so, the more successful they were in boosting
speed and trimming their fuel needs, the worse the economics of ocean freighters became. By 1950 or
so, the ocean freighter was dying, if not already dead.
All that was wrong, however, was an incongruity between the industry’s assumptions and its realities.
The real costs did not come from doing work (that is, being at sea) but from not doing work (that is,
sitting idle in port). Once managers understood where costs truly lay, the innovations were obvious: the
roll-on and roll-off ship and the container ship. These solutions, which involved old technology, simply
applied to the ocean freighter what railroads and truckers had been using for 30 years. A shift in
viewpoint, not in technology, totally changed the economics of ocean shipping and turned it into one of
the major growth industries of the last 20 to 30 years
3. Process Needs
Anyone who has ever driven in Japan knows that the country has no modern highway system. Its roads
still follow the paths laid down for—or by—oxcarts in the tenth century. What makes the system work
for automobiles and trucks is an adaptation of the reflector used on American highways since the early
1930s. The reflector lets each car see which other cars are approaching from any one of a half-dozen
directions. This minor invention, which enables traffic to move smoothly and with a minimum of
accidents, exploited a process need.
What we now call the media had its origin in two innovations developed around 1890 in response to
process needs. One was Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype, which made it possible to produce
newspapers quickly and in large volume. The other was a social innovation, modern advertising,
invented by the first true newspaper publishers, Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, Joseph Pulitzer of
the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst. Advertising made it possible for them to distribute
news practically free of charge, with the profit coming from marketing.
When an industry grows quickly—the critical figure seems to be in the neighborhood of 40% growth in
ten years or less—its structure changes. Established companies, concentrating on defending what they
already have, tend not to counterattack when a newcomer challenges them. Indeed, when market or
industry structures change, traditional industry leaders again and again neglect the fastest growing
market segments. New opportunities rarely fit the way the industry has always approached the market,
defined it, or organized to serve it. Innovators therefore have a good chance of being left alone for a
long time.
5. Demographic Changes
Managers have known for a long time that demographics matter, but they have always believed that
population statistics change slowly. In this century, however, they don’t. Indeed, the innovation
opportunities made possible by changes in the numbers of people—and in their age distribution,
education, occupations, and geographic location—are among the most rewarding and least risky of
entrepreneurial pursuits.
6. Changes in Perception
“The glass is half full” and “The glass is half empty” are descriptions of the same phenomenon
but have vastly different meanings. Changing a manager’s perception of a glass from half full to
half empty opens up big innovation opportunities.
A change in perception does not alter facts. It changes their meaning, though—and very
quickly. It took less than two years for the computer to change from being perceived as a threat
and as something only big businesses would use to something one buys for doing income tax.
Economics do not necessarily dictate such a change; in fact, they may be irrelevant. What
determines whether people see a glass as half full or half empty is mood rather than fact, and a
change in mood often defies quantification. But it is not exotic. It is concrete. It can be defined.
It can be tested. And it can be exploited for innovation opportunity.
7. New Knowledge
Knowledge-based innovations differ from all others in the time they take, in their casualty rates,
and in their predictability, as well as in the challenges they pose to entrepreneurs. Like most
superstars, they can be temperamental, capricious, and hard to direct. They have, for instance,
the longest lead time of all innovations. There is a protracted span between the emergence of
new knowledge and its distillation into usable technology. Then there is another long period
before this new technology appears in the marketplace in products, processes, o r services.
Overall, the lead time involved is something like 50 years, a figure that has not shortened
appreciably throughout history.