Priorities towards innovation and entrepreneurship

Dr. K. Kuhathasan CEO: Cenlead

The turbulent times in business are over! Goodbye to an era of downturn. Let us all welcome the new era of progress, prosperity and productivity! It is good news that an era of turnaround is to unfold! We must be well prepared to capitalize on this new era of vast challenges and opportunities.

Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship should be encouraged at all levels. It is only through the creative process, innovative approaches and entrepreneurship spirit that we can march ahead and move forward.

Commitment

Most companies do not lack ideas. What they are short of, however, is the commitment of people to lend their weight, to help and support those ideas. Commitment is display in your support for something. Commitment is what people actually do each and every day. It is the little things as well as the big things they do.

It is listening to ideas, taking time with people, offering assistance, overcoming barriers, encouraging people and being true to your word. Commitment is saying you are going to do something and then doing it. Commitment is how you behave.

For innovation to become a way of work, people should display and demonstrate their commitment at every level of the organization.

Ideas

Innovation requires people to think in different ways. It needs people who are good at analysis and problem solving. It needs people who are good at coming up with ideas and following hunches. It needs people who are good at implementing ideas and getting things done.

Some of the key players in an organization who are responsible for innovation:

* Creative thinker: produces new and original ideas

* Innovator: brings new products/services to the market of changes existing ones

* Inventor: produces new and commercial ideas

* Entrepreneur: conceives or receives ideas and translates them into business reality to exploit a market opportunity.

* Intrapreneur: responsible for innovation within an organisation.

* Champion: has the determinations remove obstacles.

Effective innovation requires:

1. A blend of new ideas.

2. The ability to get things done.

3. Sound commercial sense.

4. Customer focus.

5. A conducive organizational climate.

Innovative organizations do not happen by chance. They are the end products of good leadership and management. The essence lies in getting the balance right between freedom and order, between the anatomy of the parts and the integrity of the whole.

It is important for all managers and leaders to:

* Understand creativity and the creative processes.

* Eliminate impediments to creativity and creative thinking.

* Widen their field of view as well as that of their staff.

* Build on ideas and not merely criticise them.

* Tolerate doubts and uncertainties.

* Adopt a creative attitude in listening, observing and reading.

* Be confident in your own creative skills.

* Make time to think.

* Participate creatively as a leader, manager or members of a team.

* Use teams to innovative effectively.

* Manage innovation in your business.

The new entrepreneur

We are entering an era in which emphasis will be on entrepreneurship. However, it will not be an entrepreneurship of the past that is, the ability of a single man to organize a business he himself could run, control, embrace. It will rather be the ability to create and direct an organization for the new. We need men and women who can build a new structure of entrepreneurship on the managerial foundations.

The business person will have to acquire a number of new abilities, all of them entrepreneurial in nature, but all of them to be exercised in and through a managerial organization.

Entrepreneurship calls for good leadership throughout an enterprise. Good leadership ought to stem from the chief executive. It is his or her prime responsibility to manage change. As the Roman author Publilius Syrus said, 'Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.'

Unrealized potential

Luck, chance, and catastrophe affect business as they do all human endeavours.

Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential. No matter how successfully a business organize itself for the challenges and opportunities of the present, it will still be far below its optimum performance. Its potential is always greater than its realized actuality.

* Always look for business potential.

Convert them from problems into opportunities and bring extraordinary returns. Opportunities have to be reflected against the experience of a company and against its past successes and failures. Sometimes all that is needed to accomplish this transformation is a change in the attitude of the executives. Three questions will bring out the hidden potential of a business.

* What are the restraints and limitations that make the business vulnerable?

* What are the imbalances of the business?

* What are we afraid of, what do we see as a threat to this business and how can we use it as an opportunity?

Good leaderships

Innovation is more than having new ideas: it includes the process of successfully introducing them or making things happen in a new way. It turns ideas in to useful, practicable and commercial products or services.

As nature illustrates, most changes happen gradually. Innovation encompasses this gradual improvement of existing ideas and forms, products and services as well as the marketing of new inventions or creations. Like snowballs, these changes soon add up to a program of continuous innovation.

Change calls for managerial leaders. Change throws up the need for leaders; leaders tend to bring about change. Although innovation is a natural process it is much more effective, if it is properly led. that means that it must be welcomed, planned for, controlled, monitored and, above all, guided towards the ends of the organization.

Avoid change for change's sake, for it rarely pays thoughtless alteration or modification can lead to a loss, if core quality in a product or service. "Striking to be better," wrote Shakespeare, 'oft we mar what is well.'

Without good leadership desired change will not happen in time. Leaders need personal qualities, notably enthusiasm, and professional skills to involve others in decision making and the management of change.

An innovative organization has to learn to live with risk. Risk cannot be justified, however, if no one bothered to weigh or calculate it. To underestimate risk sometimes signals lack of experience or judgement, but to ignore risk altogether is plain foolhardiness.

Entrepreneurial business leaders have to assess risk and make decisions in conditions where all the information is not available.

That is why they make good innovators. 'Few moments are more pleasing,' wrote Samuel Johnson, 'than those when the mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking.'

Motivation and innovation

There is no innovation without motivation. People should be enthusiastic and interested in the subject at hand. It is important to recruit people who have the potential for this.

This type of person tends to be adventurous and independently - minded. Young people are often more future - orientated and open to new experiences, with fewer preconceptions and assumptions. Therefore, it is good for organizations to recruit intelligent, enthusiastic and creative young people who have a willingness to put new ideas into practice.

With these characteristics managers should

* Manage for creativity and innovation

* Provide an organizational environment in which innovation can thrive.

* Use a variety of techniques to stimulate ideas for products, services and systems, and to generate ideas for bringing these to fruition.

Creative thinkers and innovative doers will not stay with you unless you give them recognition. Recognition and appreciation come top of the list of expectations that creative people bring with them to work.

Creative leadership means the kind of leadership that encourages, stimulates and guides the process of innovation from beginning to end. The challenge of innovation is largely the challenge of leading creative people.

Test yourself

1. How much of your time do you spend thinking?

2. What do you do with your thoughts?

3. Do you ever forget powerful thoughts?

4. Do you try to make sure that you write your thoughts down?

5. Do you keep a journal of your thoughts?

6. Do you try to assemble all relevant material before concentrating on the solution?

Let innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship thrive well in you and in your organization in this new era of plenty progress, prosperity and productivity.

Most companies do not lack ideas. what they are short of however, is the commitment of people to lend their weight, to help and support those ideas. Commitment is displaying your fullest support for ongoing innovative and creative activities and actions.

For innovation to become a way of work, people should display and demonstrate their fullest commitment and involvement in every activity of the organization.