Innovation belongs to main open issues of the modern business. Information for the invention-innovation process is an even more open issue, because informed guessing about the future needs of future potential customers is a best case scenario. This is especially true in SMEs with their limited human resources, but the market provides no allowances for them anyway. SMEs are 99% of all organizations in EU or Slovenia. They provide +50% of jobs and +70% of new jobs. But they can hardly survive with no or poor innovation capacity, including a requisitely holistic consideration of the entire invention-innovation-diffusion process. The information system must be adapted to this fact in order to support business quality in line with the demands of the modern rather global than local market. But the usual enterprise information systems cover better the daily routine and past performance than future and innovation issues.
TopBackground: The Selected Problem And Viewpoint
The Economist (2007) states that it is time for humankind to stop considering innovation process as an art and to start viewing it as a science. This trend requires a requisitely holistic information system, unlike art. Our experience has confirmed both statements long ago (e.g. Avsec, 1986; Likar, 1998; Mulej et al, 1987; Mulej et al, 1994; Mulej et al, editors of PODIM conferences since 1978; Mulej et al., 1979; Uršič, 1993). An M.A. and doctoral program in innovation management has existed at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business since 1987, including also the innovation topics as a course in the only MBA program we know of. Here we will not report about this experience, but on findings resulting from it: a dialectical system of viewpoints of the invention-innovation-diffusion process (IIDP), and information support to it, which we have not detected in literature.
We will, of course, apply the Mulej/Kajzer’s (1998) law of requisite holism, depicted in Table 1 (Potočan, Mulej, editors, 2007d, and earlier; Mulej, 2007a). A total holism cannot be attained as expected with holism as worldview and existing related methods (Bertallanffy, 1979). This model can well support the innovation-related part of an enterprise information system, especially in its organizational dimension. We do not talk about information as a technological topic, but its organizational and social preconditions, with direct application of technology in order for the organization, such as an SME to attain innovation-based competitiveness. The process is complex, but a requisitely holistic information system can help the innovative part of business to be better integrated in the overall business process.
Table 1: The selected level of holism of consideration of the selected topic between the fictitious, requisite, and total holism
| ←----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------→ |
| Fictitious holism (inside a single viewpoint) | Requisite holism (a dialectical system, DS, i.e. synergetic network, of essential interdependent viewpoints) | Total = real holism (a system, i.e. synergetic network, of totally all viewpoints) |
The Invention-Innovation-Diffusion Process (Iidp)
Innovation starts with idea that is able, after research, to become innovation in development and marketing/application processes, and then yield benefit to authors, too, not only to users, in a diffusion process.