Organizations competing in today’s world of rapid technological and market changes are faced with the challenges of “dualism,” that is, operating efficiently in the present while innovating effectively for the future. Managers and leaders within these organizations not only have to focus on the market success and profitability of each of their established products and services but must also ensure their capability to introduce into next generation offerings those specific technical advances and product attributes that will sustain and even augment their continued global competitiveness.
What is needed, therefore, is some comparable set of concepts and principles that would reveal how to organize research, development, and engineering (RD&E) activities so that the outputs and creative ideas from innovating professionals are utilized effectively even as the organization deals with the pressures of meeting the everyday demands from its intensely competitive marketplace. How does one establish and manage an organizational RD&E setting such that new technical advances and developmental efforts not only take place but ultimately take place in a very timely, effective, and successful manner?
In this training course learn how to:
The Motivational Model of Leaders
The motivational model of leaders looks at the problems associated with fostering the creative performance and career contributions of individual professionals. This course contains several readings that discuss the results and implications f important studies dealing with the management and leadership of very creative individual contributors in organizational settings.
The Management of Innovation of Groups and Teams
This section covers a number of important issues related to the management and leadership of professionals within groups and cross-functional project teams. Practice the formation and management of high-performing technical teams both through case studies of DEC’s Alpha design team and Sun Microsystem’s development of JAVA and through a selection that summarizes many years of research around exceedingly high-performing groups and project teams. Then explore some of these cases’ issues and problems from a cross-functional team perspective and discusses how to maintain a team’s performance over time, especially if the team becomes increasingly stable and complacent.
Leaders Role in the Innovation Process
Investigate the role of the technical manager and describes many of the problem-solving activities he or she needs to orchestrate and manage during the development and design of new products and services. Discuss and compare various informal leadership roles that technical professionals and managers have to carry out, especially as they try to start, entrepreneur, and implement critical organizational changes and radically new product development and service initiatives. One of the selections in this section presents a nice roadmap-type model for conceptualizing the innovation process and the critical roles that need to take place to support this process.
Managing Innovational Climates within Organizations
This section of the course discusses a variety of organizational processes and practices that influence an organization’s ability to innovate in a timely and effective manner. It focuses on the decision making process, stressing important differences in the management of routine, versus non-routine, work as well as how managers who make “fast” decisions differ from those who are substantially slower at making key decisions. On the contrary, participants discuss a number of important issues from a human resource management perspective, including issues of diversity, rewards, and dual ladder promotional systems. The issue of reducing product development cycle times as well as the conventional wisdom about being “first to market” are addressed directly by including the frameworks, experiences, and caveats from several well-known consultants and researchers.
The Management of Organizational Processes of Innovation
Participants concentrate on the critical interface between marketing and R&D by including results from three renowned empirical studies. Our study portray some of the limitations of trying to come up with new product ideas by identifying key market needs, but then go on to show how organizations can enhance the management of new product developments by actively co-opting ideas and solutions from lead users and customers using toolkits. Finally, the section’s last reading presents a broad overview of the strategic management of alliances to augment and support the organization’s technological innovation program.
