least have an improved experience. This in turn will lead to growth for the organization. Innovation management is the process of managing innova- tion within an organization. This includes activities such as managing ideas, defining goals, prioritizing projects, improving communications, and motivating teams. As we will see later, innovations have particular life cycles; today’s innovation will become obsolete in the future. For organi- zations to sustain their mission, they must continuously innovate and replace existing products, processes, and services with more effective ones. Focusing on innovation as a continuous process acknowledges the effect that learning has on knowledge creation within the organization. Learning how to innovate effectively entails managing knowledge within the orga- nization and offers the potential to enhance the way the organization innovates. This element adds a further extension to our definition:
Innovation is the process of making changes to something established by introducing something new that adds value to customers and contributes to the knowledge store of the organization.
The concept of an organization’s knowledge store is partially synony- mous with the concept of organizational learning. An organization that can continuously learn and adapt its behavior to external stimuli does so by continuously adding to its collective knowledge store. The emerging perspective by specialists in the field of innovation is to define innovation in the broadest context possible. One reason for this is that if it is defined too narrowly, it may limit creativity by excluding certain avenues of inves- tigation. Innovation is linked to the concepts of novelty and originality. However, novelty is highly subjective. What may be a trivial change for one organization may be a significant innovation for another. Based on this perspective, we can further extend the definition of innovation as follows:
Innovation is the process of making changes, large and small, radical and incremental, to products, processes, and services that results in the introduction of something new for the organization that adds value to customers and contributes to the knowledge store of the organization.
This latter definition, although general, is specific enough to illustrate a number of core concepts of innovation as applied in any organization. Applying innovation, which is the main focus of this book, can be defined by adding a number of key words to the preceding definition.
Applying innovation is the application of practical tools and techniques that make changes, large and small, to products, processes, and services that results in the introduction of something new for the organization that adds value to customers and contributes to the knowledge store of the organization.