This is a way to create the permanent innovation culture in the organization. The term Know How Based innovation was originally coined by Sigvald J. Harryson. I have been honored to be the part of the session, he has conducted on this topic. This article is the summary of that session with some additions based on my personal experience.
The innovation process once dependent on Intra Corporation know how is no longer the same. The competition is increasing and market dynamics are changing. The organizations have to look for resources other than their own to coop with the innovation challenge.
In this methodology organization, instead of solving every problem in-house. Try to find the people or the organizations, who have already tackled similar type of problems. The next step is to transfer or use their ability to solve own problems. The ability to form a network of holistic nature is of at most important in order to utilize the full potential of Know who based innovation.
Gunnar Brock, former president and CEO of Tetra Pak Group Organizations while expressing his views about the critical barriers to innovations suggests organizations. Organizations need to foster a culture that does not expect everything to be developed in-house and must focus more efforts on integrating the knowledge of others. He also talked about the myopic problem of the professionals in his own words “we should rotate our engineers out of R&D so that they better understand the needs of our customers instead of becoming too myopic in their own specialized fields.”
[h=2]Guide Line to Implement Know who based innovation[/h]1. The narrow specialization and performance scope of each individual makes it difficult to turn creative ideas into product innovations responding to global market needs. Corporate infrastructures must resonate with the open sharing of ideas, technologies, and human resources, both within and between business units.
2. Reward collective achievements instead of individual performance. Only then will the corporate-wide forums of interaction bring the intended benefits. For open sharing and collective learning to take place, incentive and performance measurement systems must consider holistic results
3. The courage to perform creative destruction this is to make your own products obsolete before others do so. Lewis Platt, the former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company, once said, “We have to be willing to cannibalize what we’re doing today in order to ensure our leadership in the future. It’s counter to human nature, but you have to kill your business while it is still working.”
Developing an entirely new product that competes with and kills other products offered by the same company is a difficult task that usually meets a lot of internal resistance, especially when there is no holistic performance measurement.
4. Multiple Competencies and Redundancy for Cross-Functional Learning. Excessive employee specialization and corporate fragmentation prevent both cross-functional learning and technology transfer from taking place in a large number of companies. The lack of knowledge of where to find the relevant knowledge and technologies is a frequent cause of long lead times and expensive projects. The best way to get around this knowledge isolation is to rotate people across functions and make sure that all knowledge is available everywhere through human know-who networks.
5. The Leveraging of Extra corporate Creativity and Human Know-How Channels. Many know how based companies are reluctant to rely on external sources of technology. The first reason to stop them is that they think that they are far better than others, and secondly, they worry that external suppliers may steal their innovations. This ‘we-are-the-best’ mentality, unfortunately, works very much against any type of innovation alliances or the acquisition of external innovation.”
6. Weakness arises from the lack of market orientation on the part of R&D. R&D personals should be fully aware of the recent market trends and customer needs
[h=4]Author: Muhammad Tayyeb Riaz is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the School of management studies in The University of Faisalabad.[/h]
