By: Denekew A. Jembere
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Overview
There are many models or frameworks that are proposed to represent and ease the understanding of the process of innovation and its management. Some of these frameworks focus mainly on an organization and the innovation process steps needed to ensure the long-term and continued success of the organization, within its own boundary. There are also frameworks that are proposed to enable a mutual-benefit and success between organizations through cross-boundary innovation activities undertaken by the organizations involved.
Innovation Management Frameworks
The following four frameworks are detailed and proposed in four different studies, with a similar intention to represent, facilitate and ease the understanding of the innovation management process.
- The product-service system (PSS) framework (Song et al, 2015)
- The innovation funnel framework (Biazzo et al, 2013)
- The knowledge innovation management (KIM) framework (Briones-Peñalver et al, 2015)
- The Integrative framework (Kasemsap, 2017)
A Comparative Overview of the Frameworks
A closer look at the details of the four frameworks, listed above, reveals that all of them are proposed with an intention of achieving a similar objective, which is, to facilitate and ease the understanding of the innovation management process. However, they should be further examined for their similarities or differences in terms of focus, strengths, and applicability to managing processes and new technologies. Therefore, Table 1 shows this comparison.
Because of its clarity and detailed depiction of the constructs which are used to create the framework as well as its ability to effectively manage both processes and technology, PSS could be the framework of choice for a software company. With this in mind, further analysis of PSS’s application, in a software firm, is presented below.
Analysis of a Framework, Product-service system (PSS)
Based on their observation on the need for systematic innovation management of the product-service system (PSS), Song et al. (2015) proposed the framework shown in Figure 1, which depicts strategy, innovation support, and tactic as the three levels of systematic innovation management.
The PSS Strategy level
- The framework has five main elements, i.e. customer segmentation, value proposition, PSS element analysis, partner value network, and value creation mechanism
- These five elements of this level align with the business models of most software industry firms and how they deal with their customer or market segmentation; their hardware/software vendors and partners; their strategic level value propositions for a new product or service; and the mechanisms they employ to creates value.
The PSS Tactic level
- At this level PSS deals with the building blocks of PSS innovation, which are:
- Identifying and transforming stockholders’ requirements into design specs
- Identifying a PSS concept as a solution involving stakeholders to design and integrate the required elements to satisfy stakeholders’ requirements;
- Realizing the PSS concepts through the cost-effective allocation of resources
- Identifying potential risks of PSS and enhancing its availability, reliability, and maintainability through the sustainable operation of PSS;
- Carrying out a robust PSS prototype to validate the feasibility of the PSS concept and before the PSS delivered to customers
- The tactic level building blocks of PSS, detailed here, align with the innovation process management exercises of most software industry firms. In the software industry, a new product or service will undergo a similar process from requirements identification to implementation and then to packaging the product or service for the market. Moreover, regardless of the size of the requirement, the use of a robust prototype is the most frequently used technique to do a proof of concepts (POCs) in a cost-effective way and make sure the solution identified is feasible, adds value to the end-user whereby providing a competitive advantage to the firm.
The Innovation Support level
- This level, in PSS, deals with PSS specific managements related to innovation: requirement management, collaborative concept management, innovation resource management, reliability management, and performance management.
- As this level is the foundation of the innovation process, Software industry firms have similar innovation support level in which they capture direct and indirect customer feedback from products and services that are already released. This customer activity feedbacks would result in an improved or enhanced version of the same product or service or a totally new product. Moreover, there is a dedicated R&D group where new ideas or concepts get managed and researched in detail from the perspective of resource requirements, reliability, and performance of a potential solution before it moves to the product or service development groups.
Suggesting an improvement to the PSS
Due to financial or technical needs, ignoring their market rivalry, organizations like Google and Microsoft ( Mombrea, 2015; Zander, 2014), are creating an alliance to create innovative solutions that would benefit the customers of these organizations. Therefore, given a chance to add at least one improvement to the PSS framework, updating the framework in such a way that management of innovation projects with inter-organization cooperation can be facilitated.
References
Antonio-Juan Briones-Peñalver, Jose-Luis Roca-Gonzalez, & Inmaculada-José Martínez-Martínez. (2015). Innovation Management Based on Knowledge: Analysis of Technology-Based Defense Companies. In Handbook of Research on Effective Project Management through the Integration of Knowledge and Innovation (p. 275). Hershey, PA, USA
Biazzo, Stefano, Garengo, Patrizia, & Bernardi, Giovanni. (2013). A new funnel framework to support innovation management in SMEs. International Journal of Management Science & Technology Information, 100.
Kijpokin Kasemsap. (2017). Strategic Innovation Management: An Integrative Framework and Causal Model of Knowledge Management, Strategic Orientation, Organizational Innovation, and Organizational Performance. In Organizational Culture and Behavior: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (p. 86). Hershey, PA, USA
Mombrea, Matthew. (2015). Google’s Angular 2 Being Built with Microsoft’s TypeScript. ITworld, ITworld. Retrieved from, www.itworld.com/article/2894936/googles-angular-2-being-built-with-microsofts-typescript.html.
Song, Wenyan, Ming, Xinguo, Han, Yi, Xu, Zhitao, & Wu, Zhenyong. (2015). An integrative framework for innovation management of product–service system. International Journal of Production Research, 53, 2268.
Zander, J. (2014). Announcing Collaboration with Google and Docker to Support New Open Source Projects on Microsoft Azure. Retrieved from Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-collaboration-with-google-and-docker/
