You have to be innovative, the need to innovate is becoming a growing demand nowadays. And we start by asking ourselves: really, do we have to innovate? Why innovate? Where does innovation lead us?
By way of reflection on this topic, I would like to begin by answering some of the following questions:
1.1 what is innovation?
Innovation is recognized as a novel proposal, in the form of a new product, new process or new organization that has acceptance in the market and application in society.
Thus, for example, we could speak of innovation when a pharmaceutical laboratory launches a new product (repaglinide) for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, for example. In this case, it is expected that behind it there is a patent, and an arduous investigation with the consequent investment.
Said laboratory with its product and with the expected success in the market would have a result that will allow it to strengthen and / or define its competitive position.
Therefore innovation is a sine qua non condition for competitiveness.
Moreover, continuing with our laboratory, in it there are researchers who have already been working on certain lines for years, it is expected that they have already produced previous products, therefore we speak of a technological trajectory.
1.2 What is a technology path?
It is the path traveled by a company, a laboratory, a research group, and even a researcher; during which he accumulates knowledge in a certain direction.
And it is expected that depending on its technological trajectory a company will launch products to the market that reflect the level of technological development in which it is located.
An exemplary case would be that of the technological trajectory of Ford, from its inception to today. As the company produces, accumulates knowledge and learns new ways of conceiving and producing, it presents various alternatives to the market. And we appreciate this in the evolution from the T model (1909-1927) to the Escort (1968-2003).
Fig. 1 Ford Escort and T models.
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Something else clearly knowing what its technological or "core business" trajectory is helps a company to clearly define where it will place emphasis on research and will help it identify the knowledge it has and what it needs to incorporate. Thus, the company could also "stop" operating in a certain distant area of its "core business" or delegate it to another organization.
This was done by Petrobras in the 1990s when it delegated some of its activities to other organizations in order to focus on its identified “core business”, which is deepwater exploration and extraction with inherent technology.
Knowing its trajectory a company can clearly know where it comes from and where it is going. There would then be a certain technological determinism, that is, what the company will do depends on what it has already done.
We could affirm, then, that throughout the technological trajectory the knowledge of the organization is accumulated and built. That is why the concepts of “learning organization” are so in vogue today.
1.3 What are the ingredients of innovation?
To innovate, knowledge and creativity are needed, according to the following relationship:
where:
K = knowledge.
C = creativity.
I = innovation.
X = acceptance in the market.
Y = solution of a social problem.
Which is interpreted that the sum of knowledge and creativity will give an innovation as long as it is successful in the market and / or solves a social problem.
And this equation helps us to reflect and further problematize about the simplicity and complexity of innovation.
And so we identify the necessary dimensions to obtain and / or achieve innovation.
Knowledge.
The organization to innovate goes out to look for new knowledge, obviously after evaluation and determination of its own knowledge, which allows it to develop new products, processes, or organizational forms.
For which the company seeks interactions that allow it to establish links to capture that knowledge, this happens by knowing who has the knowledge that the company needs and what would be the strategy to incorporate it. In this logic, strategic alliances are proposed with universities, with other companies, with research institutes, company acquisitions, mergers, among others.
Adequate knowledge management will imply a double management of knowledge flows, exogenously and endogenously. The endogenous dimension goes through the evaluation of intellectual capital and the correct identification of the technological trajectory.
It will also be necessary to typify the types of knowledge involved, both tacit and articulated.
In its strategy to capture knowledge, the company also seeks favorable spaces in which knowledge flows intensely and where it is possible to speak of both a regional technological trajectory and a learning region. That is why the location criteria of companies, in the so-called knowledge society, need to be rethought according to a more flexible logic.
Among these spaces conducive to innovation are those of spontaneous training such as clusters and those planned such as technology parks; in them the intensity of the interactions is exacerbated which accelerates the innovation process in the companies belonging to it.
The creativity
Despite all the knowledge is not enough, ideas, creative ideas are essential.
And how do creative ideas arise? Is it forbidden to dream? How do we encourage creativity in the company?
Well, without creativity we will hardly have an innovative company.
We can encourage creativity in the company and therefore the emergence of creative ideas to the extent that we integrate the systemic thinking of the members of the organization, to the extent that we encourage spontaneity and generate creative spaces.
Where are the creatives? Who are the creatives?
Here they are, these are. Creativity is in all of us to a greater or lesser extent, the challenge is to channel it, to discover it.
A metaphor that I usually propose is the following: if we have a plant and suddenly we move it to a dim environment, it - the plant - will seek to survive and its survival will depend on capturing the light so necessary for its internal processes of photosynthesis.
So the plant looks for a solution to its problem of lack of light, because it wants to survive, it adapts to change and "approaches" a distant window to capture the light. For this she needed: desire to survive solving the problem of lack of light, "optimism", ability to adapt to change, flexibility, among others.
So creativity is adaptation? If it is adaptation, it is survival. For some authors creativity beats entropy. Entropy is the irreversibility of the lost order, according to which the disorder tends to increase spontaneously in a system after continuous modifications. Creativity is the ability we would have to reverse that disorder. Let's get creative, let's defeat entropy.
Creativity is to some extent a playful activity, linked to the right hemisphere of our brain that of sensitivity and emotions. For example, the creativity of Ulysses was to think that placing people inside a horse could enter Troy, the knowledge there was those of the constructive art and the Trojan idiosyncrasy of accepting the present. The innovation obviously that was the product that allowed the taking of Troy - solution of a social problem at least for the Greeks.
So innovation is not something so new? It seems that yes, what is the incidence of the study of innovation processes in the face of a concrete and real event, the accelerated growth of all kinds of innovations and the fact that they become the current competitive variable.
There are techniques to encourage creativity and generate ideas; According to a well-known author on the topic of creativity, out of every 60 creative ideas one becomes an innovation. So you have to generate a lot of ideas, a lot of ideas to guarantee some innovations. Let's try to generate creative ideas every day; it's hard doing it not solving our problems.
So far we have only preliminarily analyzed the terms on the left side of our equation (K + C). We still lack those on the right side of it, which will be a reason for future reflections.
1.4 Do innovations have to be “surprising” and high-impact?
Yes and no; There are those breakthrough innovations that some would say “innovations with a capital letter”, these are those that have meant significant and radical changes in the paradigm in a certain sector and have meant a new way of understanding that technology. These are the so-called radical innovations.
We have cases, as in electronics initially you had tube TV, but then the transistor entered the scene. Indeed, Bell laboratories were looking for materials for the design of components of communications systems, because the vacuum tubes were very hot - specifically the transmission of sounds over long distances; from 1945 to 1949 the transistor theory was developed and verified. In 1956 Bardeen, Schokley, and Brattain received the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor. As the transistor is smaller than the vacuum tubes, miniaturization in electronics began with it. From the 50s and 60s electronic equipment was built where the transistor replaces the vacuum tube with the consequent energy savings, smaller size and greater efficiency.
But the thing did not stop there and then the transistors were grouped together with other components in an integrated circuit (SLT) until the large-scale integration in the chips (LSI).
And in mechanics it was the history of machine tools such as mechanical lathes, which gave way to numerical control lathes with their respective programming "G" codes that allowed the specialist to program the stages to be carried out in the same way. sequential; up to the manufacturing cells and the design / manufacturing integration where the different mechanical elements can be manufactured in a CAD station and immediately through a CAD / CAM interface.
These innovations are groundbreaking and it could be said that the new technology differs substantially and radically from the previous one.
But not all innovations are disruptive and radical, there are those gradual ones that mean continuous improvements in products and processes. These innovations are called incremental innovations.
A case of incremental innovations can be found in the work of Petrobras in the exploration and extraction of oil in deep waters. Where continuous technological improvements have meant being able to extract the oil in ever deeper waters.
We have a specific case in the project to improve the stakes for fixing to the seabed carried out in 2000, where prototypes were made on a reduced scale to simulate working conditions at sea. Based on these tests and prototypes, the stakes were optimized with consequent cost savings and operational improvements.
1.5 Are the innovations only technological?
Innovations are not only technological, innovations can also be organizational.
And an example of this is found in the services.
A notable case of organizational innovations can be found in supermarkets.
Starting in the 90s, supermarkets introduced:
i) the concept of fresh products, that is, they lead their stores to sell: fruits, vegetables, meat and fish; products that increase the frequency of customer purchases, those that go from a weekly or fortnightly frequency to a daily frequency.
ii) introduction of information technologies, such as EDI, which allows rapid sales registration, better inventory management, and interconnection with suppliers.
iii) the use of own brands, thereby reducing the costs related to brands.
iv) deferred payments to suppliers (30-60-90 days), which allows them to have cash immediately according to the sales rhythm and even to be able to sell the products at a lower price than the supplier itself.
1.6 Does innovation have a dynamic?
There is a lag for example between a product innovation and its corresponding process innovation.
In the case of a product innovation, there is an introduction stage, then a growth stage follows, followed by a stabilization stage and finally a decline stage.
There is a typewriter invention that resulted in a patent in 1714, but despite having an invention, it only became an innovation almost 100 years later. Thus, we can also perceive the difference between an invention and an innovation.
Although there were patents and previous studies such as the one mentioned, the year 1874 can be considered as the beginning of the typewriter market with the introduction of the Remington machine with continuous improvements such as the shift key, it was not until 1895 that the growth stage where the use of the typewriter is already imposed.
This was followed by the stabilization stage where, with the product already stabilized, small improvements were made without changing the concept, focusing rather on innovations in the production process.
Until a time came when the mechanical typewriter began to be replaced by the electro-electronic typewriter and finally by the word processor. There began the stage of decline.
1.7 Is the innovation process linear or simultaneous?
The innovative process is simultaneous, even chaotic. You can no longer wait to finish one stage of the investigation before you can move on to the next.
In other words, one should not expect to finish the R&D phase, but rather to seek continuous interaction between various areas of the companies, which is what is currently happening as shown by the Kline model.
1.8 Who innovates?
The sources of innovation are diverse and depend on the sectors, generally the innovators are the manufacturers of the products themselves, as in the case of the automotive industry. Thus, the innovation in Toyota occurs within the company, the same happens with household appliances, among others.
Sometimes the supplier innovates as in the food industry; For example, in the sugar industry, many innovations are applied from suppliers of machinery and equipment.
We appreciate the user as an innovator in the use of some scientific equipment, where it is the users, according to their needs, who request the introduction of improvements in them, for example in microscopes for biology.
I would like to finish these lines, which I hope has been to your liking, pointing out that innovation being a sine qua non of competitiveness, and assuming that we want to be a more competitive country, then: it is time to innovate.
