Module 3: Innovation: The creative pursuit of ideas

• Opportunity Identification => is central to the domain of entrepreneurship.
• Opportunity identification involves:

  • The creative pursuit of ideas
  • The innovation process
• The first step for any entrepreneur is the identification of a “good idea.”

  • The search for good ideas is never easy.
  • Opportunity recognition can lead to both personal and societal wealth.
• How entrepreneurs do what they do:

  • Creative thinking + systematic analysis = success
  • Seek out unique opportunities to fill needs and wants
  • Turn problems into opportunities
  • Recognize that problems are to solutions what demand is to supply.
• Creativity => the generation of ideas that result in the improved efficiency or effectiveness of a system.
• Two Important Aspects of Creativity:

  • Process
  • People
• Process => it is goal-oriented and designed to attain a solution to a problem.
• People => the resources that determine the solution.
• Two Approaches of Creative Problem Solving:

  • Adaptor
  • Innovator
• Adaptor

  • Employs a disciplined, precise, methodical approach.
  • It is concerned with solving, rather than finding problems.
  • Attempts to refine current practices.
  • Tends to be means oriented
  • It is capable of extended detail work.
  • It is sensitive to group cohesion and cooperation
• Innovator

  • Approaches tasks from unusual angles.
  • Discovers problems and avenues of solutions
  • Questions basic assumptions related to current practices
  • Has little regard for means; is more interested in ends.
  • Has little tolerance for routine work.
  • Has little or no need for consensus; often is insensitive to others.
• Creativity => is a process that can be developed and improved. Some individuals have a greater aptitude for creativity than others.
• The Creative Process:

  1. Background or knowledge accumulation
  2. The incubation process
  3. The idea experience
  4. Evaluation and implementation
• Developing your Creativity involves in:

  • Recognizing Relationships
  • Developing a Functional Perspective
  • Using your Brains
• Recognizing Relationships => looking for different or unorthodox relationships among the elements and people around you.
• Developing a Functional Perspective => viewing things and people in terms of how they can satisfy his or her needs and help complete a project.
• Using Your Brains

  • Right Brain => helps us understand analogies, imagine things, and synthesize information.
  • Left Brain => helps us analyze, verbalize, and use rational approaches to problem solving.
• PROCESSES ASSOCIATED W/ THE TWO BRAIN HEMISPHERES:

  1. Left Hemisphere
  2. Right Hemisphere
• Left Hemisphere provides:

  • Verbal
  • Analytical
  • Abstract
  • Rational
  • Logical
  • Linear
• Right Hemisphere provides:

  • Nonverbal
  • Synthesizing
  • Seeing analogies
  • Non-rational
  • Spatial
  • Intuitive
  • Imaginative
• Left Hemisphere develop skills in:

  1. Step-by-step planning of your work and life activities.
  2. Reading ancient, medieval, and scholastic philosophy, legal cases, and books on logic.
  3. Establishing timetables for all of your activities.
  4. Using and working with a computer program.
  5. Detailed fantasizing and visualizing things and situations in the future
  6. Drawing faces, caricatures, and landscapes.
• Right Hemisphere develop skills in:

  1. Using metaphors and analogies to describe things and people in your conversations and writing.
  2. Taking off your watch when you are not working
  3. Suspending your initial judgment of ideas, new acquaintances, movies, TV programs, and so on.
  4. Recording your hunches, feelings, and intuitions and calculating their accuracy.
• Innovation

  • It is the process by which entrepreneurs convert opportunities into marketable ideas.
  • It is a combination of the vision to create a good idea and the perseverance and dedication to remain w/ the concept through implementation.
  • A key function in the entrepreneurial process.
  • The specific function of entrepreneurship (Peter Drucker).
• Types of Innovation:

  • Invention
  • Extension
  • Duplication
  • Synthesis
• Sources of Innovation:

  • Unexpected occurrences
  • Incongruities
  • Process needs
  • Industry and market changes
  • Demographic changes
  • Perceptual changes
  • Knowledge-based concepts
• Invention => totally new product, service, or process.
• Extension => new use or different application of an already existing product, service, and process.
• Duplication => creative replication of an existing concept.
• Synthesis => combination of existing concepts and factors into a new formulation or use.
• Major Innovation Myths:

  1. Innovation is planned and predictable
  2. Technical specifications should be thoroughly prepared
  3. Creativity relies on dreams and blue-sky ideas
  4. Big projects will develop better innovations than smaller ones
  5. Technology is the driving force of innovation success.
• Principles of Innovation:

  • Be action-oriented
  • Make the product, process, or service simple and understandable
  • Make the product, process, or service customer-based
  • Start small
  • Aim high
  • Try, test, or revise
  • Learn from failures
  • Follow a milestone schedule
  • Reward heroic activity
  • Work, work, work