Profile of a great innovator and his contributions

Discuss about the Innovation And Creativity To Boost Its Revenues In Organizations.

The chosen innovator for this assignment is Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is an investor, entrepreneur, and most importantly the CEO of Amazon, which is currently the most popular online retailer in the world. As Jeff Bezos was born in a very humble family, in which he was also brought up, his thought process is unconventional. However, his innovations along with leadership style, which helped Amazon to boost its revenues over the past 5 years, have been much more unconventional in comparison. His contributions to the company include making Amazon the biggest online sales platform in the world, surpassing all other contemporaries. He also brought forward a wave of change in the workplace communications of his company, Amazon, by employing the work-life harmony model, instead of the work-life balance model for the employs of his company (Anderson Poto?nik and Zhou, 2014). He started Amazon and developed it into the world’s first large scale retail website. In just a span of 4 years starting from 2013 to 2017, he led Amazon to overcome stiff competitions from all around the globe to develop it into the current retailing giant it is.

The kind of innovation brought forward by Jeff Bezos is Incremental Innovation. This type of innovation involves the utilization of the available technology of the company and thereby, increases customer value of the company in the market by adding more features and design changes in the models of the products in order to attract more customers. The reverse process is also applicable, in which the unnecessary features of the product are removed in order to simplify the product (Camisón and Villar-López, 2014). In the case of Amazon, Jeff Bezos employed the incremental strategy in order to modify the online shopping experience of its customers through innovations in the design of its portal, type of offers as well as focus on selling exclusive newly released products on the Amazon shopping portal. In addition to that, Jeff Bezos also brought innovation into the marketing aspect of the products as well. In earlier versions, the product used to launch in the market through several distribution channels at once, in order to generate a global interest by releasing the product to the worldwide market. However, this idea proved to be ineffective as the products would not generate such huge interest and the big amounts of money spent on the marketing of products to make them available in all parts of the world. In order to bring a change in the promotional strategy of the company, Jeff Bezos brought about an important change in the marketing aspect of the company (Ghosh, 2015). Jeff Bezos only distributed the new products in the target market through his trusted distribution channels at first and then examine the market appeal of that product. It is after that, the secondary distribution channels will be employed, which will distribute the products on a global basis. However, the secondary distribution channels will only come into action if the product gains a widespread acceptance in its target market. Such an innovation in the marketing department saved Jeff Bzos and Amazon both in terms of money spent regularly on advertisement along with acquiring rights to make the products available in all countries worldwide.

The kind of innovation

The problems in the path to this innovation of Jeff Bezos faced the hurdles primarily from the stakeholders of his company. The major stakeholders who were involved in hindering the process of innovation were the shareholders of the company shares. The primary reason behind such a hindrance in the innovation planned by Jeff Bezos is that, the shareholders did not want to sacrifice the global appeal of their products, which they thought would hamper the company’s reputation. Meanwhile, all the contemporaries in the same industry would promote their products on the global level Amazon planned such an innovation (Hecker and Ganter, 2013). In addition to that, the shareholders who owned the shares of the company refuted to Jeff Bezos’ decision to utilize one distribution channel at a time. Their lack of interests towards such an innovation was further fuelled by the stiff competition in the industry of online shopping portals. However, Jeff Bezos defied all such hindrances towards his decision and led Amazon towards obtaining successful business market worldwide.

Jeff Bezos conceived the innovation as an idea to boost the customer value of Amazon through repeated modifications in its products. The innovation followed all the typical characteristics of an Incremental Innovation. The products would follow a phase of evaluation and revaluation, assessing all the aspects of the products including their expected market outcomes, revenue generation and popularity (Ng and Feldman, 2013). This will be followed by listing the requirements of the target market and the fallacies in the product, which caused the failures. This phase will be followed by the active phase, which will involve making all the modifications of the product and then releasing them in the market. In the case of Amazon, as it an online shopping portal, this step involved making combo offers, acquiring rights for selling newly released products such as tablets and mobile phones on the Amazon platform exclusively. Such a creative innovation led to public surges early on in the Amazon shopping portal due to the lucrative offers made on the portal, along with all the exclusive newly released products in the market. This gave rise to an increased quantity of digital footprints on the website of Amazon. In addition to that, this innovation also successfully boosted the sales of the goods of the Amazon portal by successfully managing to engage a bulk amount of consumers. Further, this innovation also resulted in Amazon developing into being the world’s most popular online retail.

Issues faced in the innovation

The managed innovation process by Jeff Bezos consisted of a marketing managing process which focused on the promotion of the products which were on display in the Amazon portal. The market appeal which was declining in many areas, were rejuvenated as a result of the innovation which was devised by Jeff Bezos. The increase in the market appeal involved the rebranding of the offers as combination offers, selling two or more products under lucrative offers. The online portal also revised its approach towards the marketing of the products, not making all of the newly released products available online in all the countries at once. This saved the company a lot of money as well as helped it to boost its sales by first establishing a strong foothold in the target market.

Strategic alignment is the process through which various staff in a business firm is made to link up in order to serve the company objectives. Strategic alignment will define the direction in which the company will move towards in the future in order to obtain the desired outcomes of the company. Strategic alignment serves the purpose to unite all the diverse departments in a company for serving the purpose of working together and cohesively towards the attainment of company goals, discarding each department’s individual goals. In the case of Amazon, Jeff Bezos’ incorporated this strategy to align the company’s various departments so that, the company can generate more revenues at the end of the financial year. Jeff Bezor followed a transformational leadership style naturally, which allowed for him to adopt such a strategic alignment easily. Moreover, Jeff Bezos was characterized by the motto Get Big Fast, which emphasized on the urgent need of Amazon to generate a larger amount of revenue within the minimum period of time available to the company. The strategic alignment of the company focused all of its employee pool into developing the new model of Amazon, which was the innovation as described earlier. The innovation also resulted in making Amazon the most popular online retail company in the world. Moreover, the strategic alignment also focused all the diverse workers of the company to focus on the objectives of the company without losing individual motivation as well. The alignment in Amazon’s case had only one objective, which was expressed by Jeff Bezos as Get Big Fast. Therefore, through employing this strategy, Bezos was able to make his huge employee pool focus on a single objective, which would contribute to the company.

Explanation of the innovation

The foresight of the concerned industry is to generate more cyber footfalls in its website, which will extend the business and guarantee exposure to more potential customers. The other foresight for the industry will be to generate new innovations for offering the consumers with more options regarding various offers of the products. These will include combo offers as well as acquiring rights to sell new products exclusively on the online portal so that, the target audience of that product get attracted to the online shopping portal. The portal will also aim to give its customers an insight into the upcoming products as well as offers, so that; the company can generate a market prior to the release of the product.

The consumer insight of this industry is to affect the mindset of the public so that, they will trust as well as rely on in comparison to the traditional methods of shopping. The core customers of this industry are currently huge and mainly consist of tech savvy persons as most of the other portions of the consumers rely primarily on the traditional style of direct shopping. In addition to that, among the online audience, there is a bulk portion that consists of online window shoppers. As a result of this, despite having a large numbers of cyber footfalls such online shopping portals fail to generate actual sales. Amazon is no exception to this phenomenon. The customers of Amazon mostly visit thousands of products and offers on a daily basis. However, these customers very rarely buy the items which they visit online. Further, the customer pool of such an online website can be segregated into customers that actually buy and the customers who will never buy from the website. Therefore, the real consumers are the part which will actually buy something from the portal. The customer insight yields that these people are the original customers.

The core technology, which Amazon utilizes in order to run its huge portal, is Linux based software in nature. The full capacity of these Linux based software model is about 53 terabytes. In addition to that, the Data house which is a central aspect in this software system is comprised of 28 Hewett Packard servers. The data house id built up of three functions, such as, historical records, queries and ETL. The ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load, which is associated with pulling the necessary data from a source and then integrating it into other sources. This complex network of Amazon handles the millions of associated back end operations on a daily basis. In addition to that, this network of Amazon manages the queries from a staggering half million third party servers regularly. Further, it sorts out those queries according to their department and even directs the respective queries towards their most probable solutions. Such an enormously complex task on a daily basis requires a huge network of software databases in order to maintain records with security as well as to direct the quires. Because of this, makes use of the Network Secure Commerce Server which will both keep the records safe and will manage the flow of data from one source to the others. The database employed stores the credit card numbers of every customer in a separate section, and this section is inaccessible by the internet users. This property of the database employed by Amazon cuts off the risk of these private data getting hacked by professional hackers. Moreover, Amazon provides for a two step verification process, in which, the consumer needs to enter a few digits of his/her credit card and the rest of those numbers by his/her phone. In this way, Amazon opts to keep the consumer’s private details secure. Further, Amazon also possesses an anti phishing software technology in order to avoid fake messages as well as emails asking for private information in the name of Amazon.

Identification of the system properties

Organizational readiness aims at the micro level, which in this case is the organizational level. In the case of Amazon, the value of organizational readiness is the factor which determines when the company can take the steps to implement the change it wants. The readiness of Amazon was immediate as Jeff Bezos wanted to see the planned changes have an immediate effect on the company. This also goes with Jeff Bezos’ motto of Get Big Fast, which would not have been possible without having immediate.

The implementation of the plan needs to be disciplined in nature, as the change, though aimed to have immediate effects, required to be a constant process. Such a process needs to have a disciplined implementation of the plan in order to maintain working according to the plan.

The different types of leadership, which may affect innovation, are autocratic leadership, democratic leadership, transformational leadership and team leadership.

The autocratic leadership is focused around the boss (Pot, Totterdill and Dhondt, 2016). In autocratic leadership, the boss holds all the authority to take all the decisions for both the employees as well as the company. This leadership style negatively affects the innovation of a company, as the employees seldom are interested to accept and implement the changes.

The next style is the democratic leadership style, which focuses on the subordinates as well to make and implement any decisions. This style reflects a more freedom in the workplace through the democracy in the employees. This style of leadership impacts the innovation of a company more positively than autocratic leadership style.

The next style is the transformational leadership style involves the whole employee pool irrespective of their hierarchies. This style of leadership is the most effective style when implementing any innovation by any company, as it involves the opinions of very employ, thus giving them a sense of importance.

The other leadership style is the team leadership style, in which the workplace is segregated into teams, who are involved in making the decisions. Among the various styles, the transformational leadership style most positively impacts innovation in a company.

The most probable hurdles in the way of the innovation are lack of proper communication, lack of motivation among the employees, lack of a proper strategy for innovation, lack of collaboration and missing the proper connection with the consumers.

The lack of proper communication can be solved by effective communication in the employees by holding team meetings and face to face interactive sessions.

An innovation process managed

The lack of motivation can be solved by offering the employees attractive bonuses and appraisals.

The lack of a proper strategy can be solved by conducting a market survey in order to understand the demands of the target market, and then making plans in order to meet those demands.

The problem of lack of collaboration can b solved by increasing the bond among the employees through interactive sessions.

The lack of proper connection with customers can be solved by an effective marketing strategy by the management o the company.

The chosen innovation principles are employee unity, motivation, focus on the consumer, and aim to get better and improvement in technical insights.

The reason for choosing employ unity is that, it ensures harmony in the workplace, thus in turn, speeds up the innovation.

The reason for choosing motivation is that it helps to drive forward the overall innovation process.

The reason for choosing focus on the consumer is that it helps to strike the right chord in the marketing aspect of the innovation.

The reason for choosing aim to get better is that it helps to channelize the innovation process for improving the product.

The reason for choosing the improvement in technical insights is that, it helps to keep the technical aspect of the innovation up to date.

The application of employee unity in a business ensures the harmony among the employees and thus, fuels the desire to work cohesively.

The application of motivation is that it helps to keep the desire of the employees to work.

The application of the focus on the consumer is that it helps to keep the business in accordance with the market demand.

The application of having an aim to get better is that it keeps the business steady as well as developing.

The application of having an improvement in technical insights is that it helps to keep the products of the company technically up to date, which in turn, helps to boost the business.

The primary process for generation of ideas is the SCAMPER process. SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate and Reverse.

Another form of idea generation is called brainstorming. In brainstorming, the number of ideas is on the focus in order to solve a problem (Rupietta and Backes-Gellner, 2017). This method of idea generation also does not involve the far of criticism as there is no assessment of individual ideas, only their number is counted. 

Strategic align

The chosen organization is Google, which is a multinational company which offers specialized service in the field of Internet and such related fields, including searching engine, advertisement technologies as well as cloud computing platforms.

The key stakeholders of Google are users, employees, advertising agencies, communities and investors.

The primary innovation goal of Google is to have a mission which matters to both the customers as well as the employees.

Another goal of Google innovation strategy is to have a steady progress in the business.

  The codes of Google, which are relevant to business, are serving its users, integrity; respect the security and the freedom for expressing the opinions, responsiveness and supporting each other.

The first dimension is an innovation which is managed. In this case, Google looked over the obvious facts in order to successfully manage their innovation strategy.

The second dimension is the strategic align. In this case, the alignment was also stable as there was quite a good workplace harmony between the stakeholders.

The third dimension is the foresight of the operating industry, which in this case is present in Google in terms of their vision towards their future.

The fourth dimension is the achievement of consumer insight by the company. Google possesses sufficient consumer insight in order to bring about the required innovation.

The next dimension is the technological aspect. Google possesses a huge network of technicians as well as technology, which would help them to bring about the desired innovation.

Next is the dimension of readiness of the company. Google has all the necessary tools for this innovation and it is therefore, well prepared to bring about this change.

The next dimension is that of, implementation through disciplined actions, which is necessary in order to make continuous progress.  

The innovational leadership strategy involved is inclined towards the transformational leadership strategy along with having a focus on developing a team strategy in order to build team unity along with developing the marketing strategy as well. The marketing aspect of the strategy was suggested by the advertising agencies which constitute one of the primary stakeholders of Google. In addition to that, the strategy will also focus on building trusted bonds among the employees. The strategy also complied with very company approach, policy as well as procedure. This is achieved by following the code of conduct as given earlier.

The existing system of Google focused more on customer satisfaction without any as such innovation of the marketing department. Therefore, the modified strategy focused on establishing a stronger advertising plan while still retaining the old idea to value customers.

The idea generation process which was followed in this case is the brainstorming process, as it encourages more participation by not criticizing the ideas.

The brainstorming process of idea generation also encouraged the employees to participate in new processes as it lacked the scope of the criticism of the ideas (Wallace et al., 2016).

Through this new innovation strategy, some new tools of innovation which were introduced were proper market study, marketing according to public demands and developing core employee relations.

The pilot is an experimental short study in order to test the future innovation. In this case, the pilot would b implemented by conducting a market survey in the small target marget of New York.

In the idea generation process, several participants were encouraged to provide ideas through brainstorming sessions. Thus, it encouraged a high degree of participation, many of which were counted in developing the new innovation strategy.

The innovation outcomes were promoted through proper marketing strategy as discussed.

The communication among stakeholders will take place in two forms, such as, direct and indirect. The direct communication will only involve face to face meetings and the indirect plan will involve interaction through emails, messages and phone conversations.

The sharing of knowledge involved frequent meetings between employees and the management.

The participants were first given psychological coaching to overcome their fears of rejection. After that, the participants were given proper training in order to both understand as well as to implement the new strategy.

Mentoring for the purpose of innovation was achieved by holding regular motivating sessions by the Hr department of the company.

The major stakeholders involved with Google’s huge business platforms are its users, employees advertising agencies and investors. The innovation plan discussed in task 1 has satisfied all the stakeholders of the company except the investors and the advertising agencies, as Google is a significantly different company in comparison to Amazon. Therefore, the only modification required in this innovation strategy is to strengthen the marketing plan of the strategy.

The workplace in this assignment is Google and the two stakeholders involved in this project in the group of three people are an investor and an advertiser.

This task will take a time span of three weeks for its completion. The project group will primarily focus to shed light on newly generated innovative ideas in order to boost the company’s business.

The workplace is Google’s headquarters in California, USA. The organizational profile of Google states that, it is the largest Internet based service offering company in the world. Currently, Google’s search engine is the most widely used search engine in the world. The primary goals of Google involve attaining the highest possible customer value and striving for continuous process of innovation instead of attaining instant perfection. However, still innovation is required for Google in terms of generating new marketing ideas, as Google’s advertising and promotional activities did not generate the desired response from its target market lately.

The project team of the three participants held a brainstorming session in order to generate new design ideas for innovation of the marketing department. The five points which came out during the time of brainstorming are as follows.

• Making the workplace more flexible, which will result in more employee satisfaction
• Making the workplace more inspiring, which will motivate the employees to work towards an achievable goal
• Making the workplace more collaborative, which will build a more harmonious
• Making the workplace social, which will help in strengthening the communication in the workplace
• Making the workplace more engaging, which will involve the workers even more into working together and unite

The barriers in the workplace which hindered the process of this project were the lack of availability of proper gadgets, which would make the process of innovation much faster and the lack of availability of proper talent, which would also make the innovation much easier through their technical knowledge.

The solutions to the mentioned problems would be to build a proper marketing strategy to promote its platforms more. The rationale for this solution would be to provide Google with an improved market plan as their current promotional strategy is not meeting its expected outcomes. The approximate cost for implementing this innovation is estimated to be around $10,000 to $18,000.

The other solution is to increase the team bonding among the various teams in the company. The rationale behind this solution is to provide a more harmonious workplace in the company. The programs required to implement this solution is estimated to be about $7,000.

References

Anderson, N., Poto?nik, K. and Zhou, J., 2014. Innovation and creativity in organizations: A state-of-the-science review, prospective commentary, and guiding framework. Journal of management, 40(5), pp.1297-1333.

Camisón, C. and Villar-López, A., 2014. Organizational innovation as an enabler of technological innovation capabilities and firm performance. Journal of business research, 67(1), pp.2891-2902.

Ghosh, K., 2015. Developing organizational creativity and innovation: toward a model of self-leadership, employee creativity, creativity climate and workplace innovative orientation. management Research Review, 38(11), pp.1126-1148.

Hecker, A. and Ganter, A., 2013. The influence of product market competition on technological and management innovation: Firm?level evidence from a large?scale survey. European management Review, 10(1), pp.17-33.

Ng, T.W. and Feldman, D.C., 2013. A meta?analysis of the relationships of age and tenure with innovation?related behaviour. Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 86(4), pp.585-616.

Pot, F., Totterdill, P. and Dhondt, S., 2016. Workplace innovation: European policy and theoretical foundation. World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, 12(1), pp.13-32.

Rupietta, C. and Backes-Gellner, U., 2017. High quality workplace training and innovation in highly developed countries (No. 0074). University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).

Schippers, M.C., West, M.A. and Dawson, J.F., 2015. Team reflexivity and innovation: The moderating role of team context. Journal of Management, 41(3), pp.769-788.

Serrat, O., 2017. Harnessing creativity and innovation in the workplace. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 903-910). Springer, Singapore.

Totterdill, P., 2015. Closing the gap: The fifth element and workplace innovation. European Journal of Workplace Innovation, 1(1).

Vila, L.E., Perez, P.J. and Coll-Serrano, V., 2014. Innovation at the workplace: Do professional competencies matter?. Journal of Business Research, 67(5), pp.752-757.

Wallace, J.C., Butts, M.M., Johnson, P.D., Stevens, F.G. and Smith, M.B., 2016. A multilevel model of employee innovation: Understanding the effects of regulatory focus, thriving, and employee involvement climate. Journal of Management, 42(4), pp.982-1004.

Yesil, S. and Sozbilir, F., 2013. An empirical investigation into the impact of personality on individual innovation behaviour in the workplace. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 81, pp.540-551.