Establishing a sense of urgency
The emphasis in this phase, which is considered to be the
most difficult, is to create a sense of urgency to the company’s
staff and more particularly to the innovation developers
and managers. The introduction of change and innovation
starts when individuals and/or groups in a company start
examining the critical performance indices of the company,
such as its competitiveness, financial performance and position
in the market, in conjunction with the potential benefits
of technological innovation. Once this critical evaluation
takes place the company can get a very clear view of the
existing weak points, and this, in turn, acts as a means of alert
for the low, mid or high level management staff. As explicitly
noted by Kotter, there are not very many chances for a company
to succeed in change; unless people feel the urgency to
act upon issues or problems. In fact, it is dull situation of a
company that may act as a fuel for emergency actions and
maneuvers, even though there is limited space for that, due
to the criticality of the situation. Although the best approach
to implement the necessary changes is to move in smaller
rather than large steps (Singh and Singh, 2012), usually
changes have to be done within very strict time and budget
limits (Steinburg, 1992; Bovey and Hede, 2001). Therefore,
this fact is more to cause high levels of stress and speculation
to an organization’s management, which eventually demands
skillful and multilevel handling and control.