Abstract
The main purpose of this chapter is to outline the role and importance of innovativeness in the modern business environment, arguing that innovativeness has a central role for current and future success of organizations. The chapter emphases typical characteristics of a modern business environment and the future outlook, upon which we identify innovativeness as a key success factor for organizations operating in modern and turbulent environments, followed by a comprehensive background for understanding innovativeness. Next, the basic types of innovations are outlined, where we are going beyond traditional tangible output of innovation process, which is still much present in business practice. In the final sections a comprehensive framework for researching innovativeness is outlined, along with the needed shift in understanding of innovative behavior, from routine to innovative thinking, working and behavior.
TopIntroduction
Today we are facing a rapidly changing society with constantly shifting demand and opportunities. The economy is global, driven by innovation and technology. Modern business environment is full of challenges, uncertainty and great opportunities, although the society has become very demanding, to all of the institutions (Chesbrough, 2017; Brunswicker & Chesbrough, 2018).
Typical for the modern business environment is also that there are many products or services (that offer the same functionality), among which customer can choose. Based on that, it becomes evident that there exists a fierce competition among organizations. For instance, the entire European Union is one single ‘market’ for the economic systems and business politics regulation as well (EuropeanUnion, 2006). Looking globally, we can also outline such tendency, where the differences between “local markets” are vanishing and it becomes evident that there is now a global competition, while only some exceptions exists, which are not taking part in this process (OECD, 2015; Foss & Saebi, 2017; OECD, 2017a).
The current humankind is moving from routine- via knowledge- to creative and innovative society. The literature describes this often as knowledge society (Carayannis & Campbell, 2009; Carayannis & Rakhmatullin, 2014), as well as innovative society (Fan et al., 2016; Bornay-Barrachina et al., 2017). Having innovations in the forefront, requires also an innovative change of thinking, since the key stakeholders, like owners, managers and employees, must give up their old values and patterns of thinking, working and behavior, and acquire new ones to make a fertile ground for innovations. In that frame an important aspect covers also new (business) concepts, which will have a decisive role in shaping the future business environment, like smart specialization (Antonelli & Cappiello, 2016; Leoncini, 2016; McCann et al., 2017) and industry 4.0 (Drath & Horch, 2014; Schmidt et al., 2015; Zezulka et al., 2016; Palazzeschi et al., 2018), to mention just few significant news in recent years.
The economy must be innovative, and the innovative economy must be created by “the innovative” persons (Ponukalin, 2014; Chesbrough, 2017). Consequently the innovative society and economy require humans to master much more entanglement than ever before, since there are no longer (Mulej & Potocan, 2009; Sapkauskiene & Leitoniene, 2010; Kibbeling et al., 2013; Tournois, 2013; Hill & Hult, 2015; Foss & Saebi, 2017): (1) Local markets hidden from the global market, (2) Chances for many humans to live with no permanent renewal of their skills in order to create innovation, be competitive and survive in the global market, (3) Markets in which supply is not bigger than demand, except for the least advanced areas in which close to a billion people are hungry, while in the other areas about a billion people are too fat to be healthy, and (4) Many areas, where humans can live with no innovation and demands for requisitely holistic thinking, called systems thinking in systems theory (Mulej, 2013).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Modern Business Environment: Stands for the environment in which organizations work; suitable are term like learning, knowledge, innovations, informatization, sustainable, smart, etc.
Innovativeness: Can be considered as capacity, competence and readiness of the enterprises and other organizations and their employees to develop virtue or introduce the novelties or inventions in the organizational work and behavior.
Industry 4.0: Refers to the fourth “industrial revolution” and is coupled with smart specialization to present and important future trend of modern business development.
Innovation: Is most generally defined as every novelty found beneficial in the experience of its users. In broader sense, innovation is renewal or increase of the offer of products/services; implementation of new methods in production, inbound logistics, and outbound processes; implementation of beneficial changes in organizations’ leadership, organization of work and work conditions; and implementation beneficial changes regarding work force and its capabilities.