Organizational Change and Innovation Research Paper

Organizational Change and Innovation - Research Paper Example It is an undisputed fact that organizations must innovate in order to benefit from new technologies and resources to stay ahead of their competitors. Innovation, therefore, is viewed as both an ends and a means of securing competitive advantage. Organizational innovation has, therefore, been defined as the process whereby organizations engage in new product development or new uses of products and services that already exist. Before attempting to analyze the challenges of innovation as a change management process, it is necessary to understand the various types of change. Radical innovation defines the introduction of a completely new product or technology that takes the place of an existing one (Griffin, 2013). Incremental innovation, on the other hand, is modifying an existing product/technology with a newer one (Griffin, 2013). Technical innovation deals with changes in the performance, appearance or other aspects of the product or of the processes through which it is passed (Griff in, 2013). Management innovation refers to changes in organizational structure or managerial processes (Griffin, 2013). Finally, product innovation deals with changes in the product as opposed to process innovation that deals with alterations in the distribution, manufacturing or creation of processes (Griffin, 2013). ... However, various companies have failed to innovate owing to various reasons. Like any other change, innovation too can be met with resistance from within the organization. Furthermore, the lack of a supporting culture and the lack of â€Å"fit† with the external environment often render innovation useless. It is worth noting the cases of companies that failed to innovate successfully because they were unable to adapt themselves to the external environment. Sony is one such company which failed with its â€Å"e-books† reader which lost its battle against Amazon (Viardot, 2011) . It was unable to find solutions to the challenges imposed by the economic and legal environment with respect to the publishers and authors. The company failed to offer a solution to managing and protecting digital rights and was unable to design an effective online store. This is contrary to the success that Amazon had in the succeeding years with its e-book service â€Å"Kindle† which par adoxically was bulkier, larger and had a smaller screen compared to Sony’s Reader. Furthermore, Kindle had limited capabilities in that it was able to source content only from Amazon. Despite these shortcomings, Kindle prospered because Amazon based its value proposition on alignment with the ecosystem. The company, instead of forcing publishers to succumb to the platform, gave them incentives to make them ‘want to’ become a part of a revolutionary milestone (Sadowski, 2013). Compared to Sony, Amazon focused on the bigger picture and even sacrificed its profits to generate volumes. Furthermore, the success of innovations by companies such as Apple have highlighted just how important it is to achieve flexibility with respect to the external environment. The company’s innovation iPod succeeded