Tibor Dőry

Innovation and excellence

Management methods for innovation transformation

Chapter 3. Sources of innovation – users as innovators?

There are numerous sources and starting points for innovative ideas and corporate innovation projects. It is useful for CEOs, innovation managers and employees working on various development projects to be aware of the channels through which innovation proposals may arrive and the factors and events that may trigger innovative ideas. Innovative ideas can be handled spontaneously, but there are also systematic methods for search activities. It is also interesting to consider how we define our search strategy for exploring completely new areas, and to what extent and how we can utilise developments related to existing processes, products and services in new forms.

Where do great innovative ideas come from? When we ask this question, many people think of geniuses and inventors. Legend has it that when Newton was sitting in his garden wondering what keeps the moon in orbit around the Earth, an apple fell from a tree and helped him understand why fruit always falls downwards from trees, never sideways or upwards. Newton then formulated his hypothesis that the same force that pulls the apple towards the Earth is what keeps the Moon in its orbit. The rest is scientific history, and everyone learns Newton's law of gravity in school, which states that any two bodies attract each other. Between two point-like bodies, this force is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Such Eureka moments are certainly part of the folklore of innovation and draw attention to the importance of new discoveries. But of course, there is much more to it than that, because as we have seen in earlier chapters of this volume, innovation is a process of transferring, reworking, testing and refining ideas. We could also say that the innovation process is nothing more than the weaving together of different strands of "knowledge spaghetti" to produce a useful product or process (Tidd-Bessant, 2013). Initiating this process is not just about occasional flashes of inspiration, as innovation can come from many directions, and if we want to manage it effectively, we need to be aware of these diverse sources and inputs. The concept of knowledge spaghetti from Professor John Bessant is well illustrated in Figure 12, which can be an important impetus for starting the innovation journey.

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Figure 12. Sources of innovation

Source: based on Tidd-Bessant (2013).

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 182 5

Menedzsment

The aim of the book "Innovation and Excellence" is to inspire and encourage company leaders, managers, and experts to initiate and implement innovation transformations with the help of professional literature and corporate case studies. Another important goal is to help develop the innovation capabilities of small and medium-sized enterprises in particular by sharing simple, proven management methods that can be tested in practice.

The first part of the volume reviews the factors of corporate excellence and success, then highlights the possible sources of innovation, with a focus on the role of users and employees. The empirical section presents a detailed description of the supportive role of the workplace environment and creative working conditions based on corporate case studies (AUDI, BOSCH, MELECS). The volume concludes with a description of selected tested practical methods and management techniques that readers can try out in their own businesses.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/dory-innovation-and-excellence//

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