Forming new businesses, entering new markets, and increasing organizational effectiveness, occurs through the innovation and transformation processes. Corporations must be able to adapt and evolve, if they wish to survive. The ability to innovate is a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
However, how is it possible for a company to breed innovation into the very bones of an organization, so that it becomes an ongoing, managed phenomenon? Is innovative thinking independent of external circumstances? Or, is there any method to its creativity? And what would an innovation model look like? The importance of innovation in regards to a businesses value is, without a doubt, the most meaningful and perhaps most essential aspect of a company. Innovation pays dividends for shareholders it drives growth and differentiation, motivates employees, opens new markets and captures customers’ attention, all while using much lower advertising budgets.
One company that has clearly done something right in the past is Google. This company is a symbol for integrative IT-infrastructures and restructuring business architecture through: experimentation, improvisation, analytical decision making, participative product development, and other noteworthy modes of innovation. It uses an evaluation of ideas with an admittedly chaotic ideation process and a set of accurate, data-driven methods. Google’s culture fascinates even the brightest technical expertise. It has developed or acquired an array of new offerings to augment the core search product. Its expansion, profitability, and shareholder equity, are at unmatched levels. It has been the designer, or a leading exponent of new paths to business and management innovation.
These are the main reasons why Google is a great allegory of innovation and a profound example of a successful integrated innovation management approach.
The purpose of this essay, based on Adapa Srinivasa Rao’s case study, “Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Google, Inc.” is to build a bridge between the company’s methods and the theoretical framework that abstractly enables and drives innovation in the corporate environment.
Contents
List of figures
1. Introduction
2. Delineation of concepts
2.1. Innovation
2.2. Corporate Entrepreneurship
2.3. Invention
3. Innovation strategies and its processes
3.1. Why is an integrated innovation strategy necessary?
3.2. Which elements are needed for innovation to occur?
3.3. Which process steps need to be implemented to adapt a sustainable innovation strategy?
4. Elements of the systematic implementation of the innovation model, based on Google Inc.
4.1. Executive Champions – Long Term Approach – Consistency
4.2. Operating Platform – Prosumer – Open Innovation
4.3. Cooperation – Mashups – Infrastructure – Acquisition
4.4. Innovation Culture – Employment Structure – Hard Work
5. Critical review
List of references III