Cultivating Corporate Innovation: Case Studies on Internationally Successful Corporations
()
About this ebook
Granting entrepreneurial freedom within as decentral structures as possible, delegating responsibility in combination with profit sharing, and leading a partnership-based dialogue among all stakeholders transports identification with the company and the tasks. This again encourages the willingness to perform and change among employees as well as the competitiveness of the company.
Three case studies of internationally successful corporations prove this context and give impulses to shape an innovation-friendly corporate culture.
Related to Cultivating Corporate Innovation
Related ebooks
Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, Second Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Innovation Paradox: Why Good Businesses Kill Breakthroughs and How They Can Change Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLean Scaleup Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInnovation Governance: How Top Management Organizes and Mobilizes for Innovation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Innovation Biome: A Sustained Business Environment Where Innovation Thrives Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBuilding a Growth Factory Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Value Profit Chain: Treat Employees Like Customers and Customers Like Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Teaching Smart People How to Learn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strategy as Leadership: Facing Adaptive Challenges in Organizations Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Big-Bang Disruption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The CEO Difference: How to Climb, Crawl, and Leap Your Way to the Next Level of Your Career Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManaging Key Competency: Powered by the Integration of Basic Knowledge, Skills and Mindsets Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDesign to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making Change in Complex Organizations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCorporate Superpower: Cultivating A Winning Culture For Your Business Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Building Better Organizations: How to Fuel Growth and Lead in a Digital Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThinkers 50 Management: Cutting Edge Thinking to Engage and Motivate Your Employees for Success Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Jim McCormick's The First-Time Manager Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Leadership Pipeline: Developing Leaders in the Digital Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat to Excellent; It's the Execution! Overcoming the Natural Barriers to Profitable Company Growth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNinja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Resurgence: The Four Stages of Market-Focused Reinvention Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEntrepreneur Voices on Company Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Culturepreneur Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCorporate Venturing: Accelerate growth through collaboration with startups Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen At Work: Win-Win Communication Strategies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Business For You
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Law of Connection: Lesson 10 from The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of J.L. Collins's The Simple Path to Wealth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed: The Definitive Book on Value Investing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, 20th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Capitalism and Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robert's Rules Of Order Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Company Rules: Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grant Writing For Dummies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Limited Liability Companies For Dummies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Step Plan to Help Your Business Take Off Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Money. Wealth. Life Insurance. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Everything Guide To Being A Paralegal: Winning Secrets to a Successful Career! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat: The BRRRR Rental Property Investment Strategy Made Simple Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Cultivating Corporate Innovation
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Cultivating Corporate Innovation - Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung
Authors
Preface
We want to discover, develop and successfully market innovative products to prevent and cure diseases, to ease suffering and to enhance the quality of life.
Novartis Mission Statement
We strive for innovation. By providing an environment and a flexible structure in which innovative thinking can flourish, we safeguard our competitive advantage long-term. Our innovative strength and drive are based onR&D, extensive chemical and technical expertise, and a sound knowledge of customers, consumers, suppliers and markets. We take into account the requirements of sustainable business practice right from the start of the innovation process.
Henkel, Vision & Values
Creating Innovation-Innovation refers to products, services and internal company processes-from a suggestion for improving the normal working day counts to developing a new product.
B. Braun, Philosophy
Innovation
over the last years has become one of the most used terms in corporate practice and management theory. There goes hardly an opportunity in which a corporate leader would not refer to the importance that the attraction of products and employee creativity have for competitiveness. This is exactly why business agrees that companies have hardly an alternative to constantly fostering innovation if they want to remain competitive and survive in the long run. In consequence, there is little wonder that practically every company today lists innovation or the capacity for innovation among its publicly announced core values.
The three companies involved in the case studies presented in this volume are no exception. Yet, to successfully create and market innovations, just announcing the willingness has never been enough. Firstly, of course, new ideas are required.
Secondly, you need an environment that fosters the development and growth-and then, in particular, the implementation-of new ideas. For what is the use of the best idea if the fear of failure and punishment exceeds the courage to dare the new
and take risks connected with it? And what is the use of ideas if the prevailing attitude says, We have always been successful, so why should we change or develop something new?
The case studies prove that companies must avoid this very attitude. In fact, companies have to develop approaches and methods to counteract such negative persistence and status-quo thinking. Taking along employees on this path, establishing transparency about the necessity of innovation, and creating the framework conditions for creative, motivated performance with the help of corporate culture are necessary preconditions.
Many companies have meanwhile realized that this is best achieved by granting entrepreneurial freedom within structures as decentralized as possible, the delegation of responsibility in combination with profit sharing, and a partnership-based dialogue among all stakeholders. Identification with the company and the tasks can thus develop, which fosters the willingness to perform and change among employees as well as the competitiveness of the company.
The aim of such companies was and is the development of a corporate culture that acknowledges and revitalizes the value willingness and capacity for innovation
as a core value. The three companies in the case studies have started from different points, yet they all show ways of promoting innovation:
- The merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz that created Novartis marked the starting point for a strategic initiative to define and implement a new, values-based corporate management for high performance and leadership in delivering innovation to patients in need.
- Henkel’s Year of Innovation 2006
was a huge and highly successful company-wide initiative to step up the mobilization of all employees and create a greater feeling of ownership among them.
- Last but not least, the example of B. Braun Melsungen shows how to tap and make best the use of the chances of open innovation
, i.e., how to open internal innovation processes outward.
All three case studies describe the active role of corporate leadership in shaping an innovation-oriented corporate culture and suitable instruments within the framework of such a culture-based innovation management.
The Novartis Group, Henkel and B. Braun Melsungen are members of the International Network Corporate Culture initiated by the Bertelsmann Stiftung. They are dedicated to further developing and disseminating exemplary leadership behavior and a corporate culture oriented toward the human being. They share the conviction that investments in analyzing, shaping and improving corporate culture are at the same time investments into the future of an enterprise. This set of case studies on innovation management was developed against this background.
The very constructive cooperation, consensus-oriented work and objective dialogue of different actors provided an example of how innovative thinking is generated and leads to valuable results. In this context, we would like to thank the authors of the case studies, Professor Bernd Kriegesmann, Professor Friedrich Kerka and Thomas Kley from the Institut für angewandte Innovationsforschung (Institute for Applied Innovation Research) at the Ruhr-University Bochum for leading the research and adding their expertise in the field of innovation research. We would also like to thank staff in our own companies without whom these case studies would not have come into being.
Prof. Dr. Ludwig Georg Braun
Chairman of the Management Board, B. Braun Melsungen AG
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Lehner
Chairman of the Management Board, Henkel KGaA
(until April 2008)
Liz Mohn
Vice Chair of the Executive Board, Bertelsmann Stiftung
Cultivating innovations- three examples of internationally successful companies
Searching for the underlying reasons of innovative success
The perception of an increased pressure for innovation and the awareness that innovations for tomorrow cannot originate from today’s rationalization programs have led many companies to step up their innovative efforts again. But reforms and ideas for reforms do not appear out of nowhere. They are based on complex processes that start with a stimulus, an idea or a mere coincidence that raises doubts and also activates barriers, that develops, tests, revises and retries solutions, that actively abandons the old and painfully establishes the new. The hope of initializing and implementing an innovation without conflict has proven to be wishful thinking. Instead, innovating companies must undergo a development process that comprises technological innovations, individual learning processes, organizational reconfigurations and the reform of supplier and customer interfaces (Kriegesmann 2003).
While a small and dynamically developing group of companies has been consistently successful at setting benchmarks with their development processes and the resulting innovative performances, a majority of companies has failed to develop the needed engagement for innovation, and well-intended initiatives to activate the workforce remain without effect. In the case of a failure, the blame game goes back and forth between the deplored risk aversion of the decision makers, the lack of creativity of the workforce or a hostile environment for innovation-corporate routines between the joy and frustration of innovation.
So why do some companies with comparable resources, similar structures and processes, and uniform strategic orientation succeed in turning their innovations into competitive advantages while others fail? What do an organization’s ability and willingness to change depend upon? What is it that promotes or blocks development and explains why only a small group of companies manages to embrace innovation?
In light of these questions, an intense debate on the underlying reasons for the success or failure of companies has evolved over the past years. A central role for the development of innovative competences has been attributed to corporate culture (Sackmann 2006; Ernst 2003; Lemon and Sahota 2004). Whether