Building an Innovation Engine (Coursework Sample)

Building an Innovation Engine
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Building an Innovation Engine
Innovation is one of the core components that drive economies since it feeds entrepreneurship. Most of the world’s valuable companies including such as Apple, Google and General Electric are driven by innovation, which in the long run enables both horizontal and vertical integration. This essay seeks to critically evaluate a formal system of innovation; the minimum viable innovation system (MVIS) modeled by Anthony, Duncan and Siren (2014). It will critically evaluate its last three steps, delineate the advantages and disadvantages of the model and critically appraise the viability of the pieces of advice offered by the authors. Analysis indicates that the MVIS is an effective innovation model as it makes it not only strategic but also systematic and tangible.
Literature Review and Analysis
Anthony, Duncan and Siren (2014) developed the minimum viable innovation system (MVIS) to address an inherent problem of reliability. As the authors aptly point out, nowadays only very few innovations are orderly and reliable. As various authors including Pisano (2015) and Funk (2014) observe, most innovations are spontaneous and are hard to replicate as the conditions that facilitated the generation of the idea change often. As such Anthony, Duncan and Siren (2014) proposed the MVIS model which has four steps, namely; defining the innovation buckets, selecting a few strategic opportunity areas, forming of dedicated teams to develop the innovations and creating mechanisms to guide the resultant projects. This essay focuses on the three of these steps.
The second step of four involves selecting a few strategic opportunity areas (Anthony, Duncan and Siren 2014). The process is to take place between day 20 and day 50 of developing an innovation. This step is the most important one in the model. This is because it not only identifies the need for resources but also the need to appropriate them in areas where the organization can leverage its key strengths (Browning and Sanders 2012). This step is in sync with the strategic scheming of organization’s resources as advocated by business thought leaders. The most popular of these frameworks is the VRIO framework. The VRIO framework stipulates that the appropriate areas chosen should bestow the company with value, rarity, imitability and organization (Chan, de Jong and Ranade 2014; Hill et al., 2014). In essence, therefore, the strategic area that the organization chooses to focus on should confer a competitive advantage (Thong and Lotta 2015). Pisano (2015), however, argues that while it is important to note that the activities at this stage are not tied to the successes of the innovation, they ensure that the innovation benefits the parent organization the most as they will be tailored to be in sync with its special capabilities.
The third step, which takes place between day 20 and day 70, involves forming a dedicated team to develop the innovation (Anthony, Duncan and Siren 2014). The size of the team to spearhead the innovation is a controversial aspect at this stage. As the authors point out, there are many startup companies in which nearly all the employees are dedicated towards innovation yet the results are not proportionate to the amount of applied efforts. At the same time, it is evident that the largest innovation-driven companies have large teams dedicated to innovation efforts (Jarvenpaa and Valikangas 2014). For the MVIS model to work, however, it is imperative that there be at least one person dedicated and working full time towards meeting the organization’s innovation functions. Contrary to propositions of some business leaders, which state that everyone in an organization should dedicate part of their working time towards innovation, an organization should actually have only a few individuals for that task (Funk 2014). This will, of course, depend on the resources available and the experience of the employees. Non-performing innovations should be dropped in order to sufficiently fund the promising ones.
The last step involves creating the mechanisms that will guide the initiated projects (Anthony, Duncan and Siren 2014). It is common knowledge that people, including employees and customers, are resistant to change, (Birkishaw, Hamel and Mol 2008). It will, therefore, be prudent not only to pick a team that will shepherd the projects but also champion for them. This team, as Anthony, Duncan and Siren (2014) warn, should not be comprised of the top management only. In this case they would transform it to an executive board meeting and, with time, neglect their duties of driving innovation. Therefore, organizations should have functioning mechanisms to start, stop, redirect innovations and eventually integrate them into the formal system of a larger organization (Pisano 2015; Thong and Lotta 2015).
Critical Discussion: Pros and Cons of MVIS
The major advantage of the MVIS system over the ad hoc innovation practices is that MVIS guarantees that only the market-relevant ideas are encouraged and developed (Anthony, Duncan and Siren 2014). Its structured way of identifying the strategic areas of opportunity and innovation mechanisms ensures that only the viable ideas that can give the organization a competitive advantage are developed. This is unlike the ad hoc innovation system that encourages spontaneity which often leads to development of innovations that are not of optimal value to an organization or those which are easy to imitate (Pisano 2015).
Moreover, MVIS speeds up the innovation process. As the model indicates, it can source for viable innovation ideas in a period of 90 days. Furthermore, MVIS does not necessitate any fundamental changes to the organization in terms of personnel and operations (Anthony, Duncan and Siren 2014). The system utilizes the existing personnel and only twitches the practices. Crucially, MVIS does not require a significant reallocation of resources. It merely frees up the resources deployed in non-performing areas and channels them towards innovation in the strategic opportunity areas.
The major disadvantage of the MVIS model is that it lacks spontaneity. It thus eventually becomes hard for the innovators to think outside the box (Browning and Sanders 2012). They are informed of the strained resources and other mitigating factors that limit the generation of ideas because the systematic model forces them to think in a structured, limited manner. Additionally, it requires the attention of the top level management in order to be effective. These people should be involved in decision making process and not in innovating functions of the company (Hill et al. 2014). Lastly, the model is not incentivized and this may make the generation of ideas slow and in other instances, non-optimal.
Stand on Advice and Justification
At the end of the article, Anthony, Duncan and Siren =offer three pieces of advice. First, the authors advise an organization to follow all the four steps of the model or else not to bother following any of them. They reckon that the MVIS model is a system and should be adopted in its entirety and not as different components. My take is that this advice is misleading as it portrays MVIS as ineffectual should it be partly implemented part. It is also obvious, as observed in the pros and cons part, that the MVIS model has its own deficiencies. Therefore, it is not optimally effective on its own. However, if some of its components are substituted or mixed with those of the alternative innovation systems then a more effective innovation system will be created (Chang, de Jong and Ranade 2014). For instance, one might prefer having a spontaneous mechanism of idea generation but still maintain the third and fourth stages of MVIS, having a dedicated team and mechanisms to shepherd the projects. It is, therefore, my considered opinion that while the MVIS guarantees predictability and productivity one should not blindly follow the model but instead twitch it to suit own needs.
The second advice is that personnel are the components of utmost importance. Anthony, Duncan and Siren (2014)...