Collaborative Innovation for the Management of Information Technology Resources

Introduction

Today’s organisations are faced with the challenge of meeting the ever increasing demands of a global customer base, whilst remaining competitive against suppliers from lower cost economies. Organisations need to constantly improve their competitive advantage and respond faster to changing markets by reducing costs, improving quality, becoming customer-driven and increasing productivity. The principal mechanism for organizational growth and sustainability is innovation. Innovation is the process of idea generation and exploitation by an organisation whose mission is to continuously add value to its customers – internal and external.

The factors that influence organisational innovation include culture, process and implementation. Factors such as fostering a risk taking environment, managing innovation continuously and portfolio management are viewed as critical for success for all types of organisations. In order to adequately address these factors and many others to be outlined later, organisations need to manage their innovation process effectively. In recent years there has been a steady growth in support for adopting a contingency approach in relation to managing organisational change, resulting in a convergence of diverse approaches to better facilitate the management of innovation. While the specific causes for the failure of innovative actions is specific to an individual organisation, there are a number of macro causes, which cuts across organisations (O’Sullivan and Dooley, 2008). These include:

• 1.

  Inadequate definition of organisational direction.

• 2.

  Ineffective mechanisms for the deployment of organisational goals to innovative actions.

• 3.

  Poor leadership of the systems innovation process

• 4.

  Poor planning in relation to generation of innovations

• 5.

  Poor implementation of proposed innovations

• 6.

  Low levels of employee participation in the innovation process

• 7.

  Ineffective results management.

Understanding these root causes of failure leads to solutions for managing innovation that can be deployed effectively in any organisation.