Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Summarizing our understanding of Organizational innovation


In last blog we attempted an understanding of the strategic adaptation theory and its implications to organizational change. In this blog we would attempt to gain a summary of some of the discussions we have had on organization change and innovation. 

A careful look at the kind of words we have used over the last few blogs would get you to realize that we have dabbled between organizational change and innovation at various points. This blog primarily looks at this question. 

"Organizational innovation" as a term is pretty ambiguous. The meaning is pretty broad and means innovation or innovative behavior in organization or organizational adaptation of innovation. The relation between organization and innovation is complex, dynamic and multilevel so getting a precise definition is pretty difficult. The concept of organizational innovation is pretty loose and slippery too!

In the discussion this far - we have looked at 3 interrelated approaches to understanding organizational innovation. 

The first focused on understanding the effects of organizational structure on the organizations ability to learn, create knowledge and generate technological innovation. The approach however, doesn’t continue the aspects of internal organizational dynamics or environmental forces factored in. The second approach used the organizational learning and knowledge creation was an approach to understand the possibility of organizational innovation. And the third approach focused on the organization's capacity for change and adaptation. 

It would be good to note here that none of these approaches individually help understand the concept of organizational innovation completely. It is very important to have an overall perspective of these approaches and apply it when the situation requires it.

No comments:

Post a Comment