Innovation And Technology

By Author: Henry Ford
Total Articles: 189
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The diffusion of innovation and technology is important in meeting the needs and problems faced by the company. Indeed this explains why the process is composed of three stages namely initiation, adoption and routinization (Zhu, Kraemer & Xu 2006). As such it could be argued that innovation becomes important in enhancing the performance of an organization. For instance, technology could prove to be essential in reducing cost, expanding the market and coordinating the supply chain. However, adoption of the innovation and technology by firms need to be aligned with the new environment. The innovations and technology is also pivotal in meeting the needs of consumers and helping them enjoy better and more quality goods and services.
Markets have proved unfriendly to innovations introduced and Chakravorti (2004) attributes this to craving for equilibrium. One of the factors that affect diffusion is the size of the firm. The small firms face challenges in adopting the new technology and innovations as compared to bigger firms due to the lack of time cost and in-availability of the technical expertise. Other factors that ...
... also come into play are the availability of business and social infrastructure.
The problems identified by Shapira and Rosenfeld (1996) involve information dissemination, management, training, financing besides developing the necessary business relationships with consumers and suppliers. According to Zhu et. al (2006) the market poses a formidable challenge in diffusion of products and thus as a manager the right strategies needed to be developed and which should include all the players. This also entails launching ambitious campaigns to sensitize the consumers and suppliers on the new innovations. This also calls for the managers to ally with the power-players where the products and processes are poisoned to complement the power players’ products and hence giving them a share of value (Zhu et al., 2006). In addition diffusing the products and processes also requires the manager to offer switching incentives and preserve flexibility in their products and marketing plans.
Part 3
Promotion of organizational learning is one way of encouraging innovation in an organization. This calls for the employees to take risk while coming up with new ideas.
Shipton, West, Patterson and Birdi argue that this calls (2005)1 for practices such as psychometric tests, work sampling activities and the centers for assessment to be established in helping to create the knowledge. The innovation does not take an individual dimension only but it is a collective responsibility. Self organizing teams are introduced and they serve a pivotal role in creating knowledge. Through dialogues and discussions they are able to pool information and come up with a collective idea As such consultation through such workgroups in an organization should also be enhanced to encourage innovation. In addition horizontal operation and performance management system also encourage innovation as it improves on the level of the interaction between the employees. This also requires the establishment of a non-threatening environment to facilitate learning and passing the ideas for implementation.
Nonaka (2007) prescribes that redundancy in an organization becomes important in managing innovations and in which case information, the business activities and the responsibilities of the managerial positions are overlapped. This also entails competition where teams are allocated same task. Redundancy helps in managing chaos where employees having overlapping information are able to consult and hence improve on the transfer of tacit knowledge. Similarly, explicit knowledge is internalized by workers leading to new innovations. Under redundancy, teams develop different approach in dealing with a similar problem and the best approach is eventually picked on. The role of management in innovation process is also vital. In essence, the strategies the management should come up with entails entail identifying the areas that need innovation, recruitment of the people to carry out innovation, allocation of resources and recognizing the effort of the employees by establishing rewarding schemes.
Part 4
There is no doubt that technology has been both beneficial and harmful to the entertainment industry. Users on the internet are able to legally download movies, music and other work. On the other hand, the holders of the copyright rights are denied their rightful compensation whenever such actions are illegal. Indeed, the internet is one tool that has enabled users to share information and data while at the same time is bound to be misused by some users.
Technologies such as BitTorrent continue to allow users to be able to download data and other internet materials at a faster speed. Users are also able to upload files while uploading them simultaneously. The technologies have also been of help to the organizations and companies in moving files and data around the web. However, despite the many benefits of technologies such as BitTorrent they also have their shortcomings. At its early inception this idea was abused by adopters who took advantage to illegally trade in copyrighted movies and music. These technologies were later to be faced with law suits where the users were enabled to share copyrighted content on the internet. Indeed, under the direct copyright, contributory copyright and vicarious copyright infringement laws in the U.S copyright Act of 1976 the copyrighter holders have the exclusive right to control the public display, distribution and reproduction of their work (Bagley & Reed, 2006). In the suits affecting technologies such as Napster the interpretation on the rights on fair use of the copyrighted material was also put to test. It is thus unquestionable that such technologies benefit from the infringement of copyrighted works while not overseeing their role of policing such systems to weed out illegal activities.
Napster, an idea of Shawn Fanning, combined the search engine, file sharing and Internet Relay Chat. It enabled the MP3 users to also chat online. Just a year after its development Napster was sued for copyright infringement alongside education institutions. The users were illegally trading on songs and according to Merriden (2001) this was violation of Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The copyright laws which are included in the intellectual property laws originated from the English law and have been part of the US constitution since the colonial times. Most of the intellectual property law is to be found in the federal statutes. However, for any work to be protected by copyright law it must be presented in a tangible form.

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