Question

Do not neglect the old for the new. The existing business must not lose priority simply because an innovative idea has been suggested. Successful innovation requires support from the existing business in terms of finance and other resources. However, when assessing risk, you must take into consideration the impact the new activities are likely to have on the existing activities. One aspect of risk assessment should involve determining whether the new ideas/ improvements or innovations will prevent the already successful operations from continuing to operate at the currently accepted level.

Choose an organisation you are familiar with. This might be an organisation you work for or you might need to conduct research into another organisation. Answer the following questions in relation to your chosen organisation, explaining and giving verifiable reasons for your answers:

1.How can frontline managers encourage and support employees so that they contribute new and innovative ideas?

2.What kinds of work conditions and procedures are in place or should be in place to support innovation?

3.What barriers to innovation exist within the organisation?

4.How can managers lead by example when it comes to innovation?

5.What training or learning opportunities might be provided so that employees can develop appropriate innovation skills?

6.Why do you think managers should regularly evaluate their own approaches for consistency with the wider organisational or project context?

7.How does the organisation’s physical environment support innovation? How might it need to be changed?

8.Outline any legislative framework that impacts on operations in the relevant workplace context.

Answer 1

It is an American multinational technology firm that deals with internet-related services and products. Some of the products include cloud computing, search, hardware, software and online advertising. The company was founded in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page who incorporated Google as a private corporation. It is located in Californian. Its usage is worldwide, and several advancement and growth strategies have been in place to make the company remains competitive globally. Girard, (2008).

Question 1

As the internet related businesses are growing and becoming more competitive, Google Limited is highly prepared to take risks for it to remain focused, competitive and fruitful. The completion in this market is high; the firm has to take risks in various areas like innovation creation. In this case, the new ideas are highly incubated and nurtured for future use. Creativity is vital hence the firm must risk taking funds to hire creative ideas.

Diversification and market expansion is a risk area that the business should also check and ensure it diverts some finances to increase its market base. Small markets should be reached interiorly and new products and services designed as per the new consumer requirements. The ideas of diversity will help the firm in stabilizing its competitive advantage. Risk taking contributes to overcoming e the fear of failure. Risk adverse companies do not succeed i9n the long run. Failing to take risk proofs an element of failure in the firm. Hill & Jones, (2009).

With the upcoming issues of computer crime and Internet cyber crime, Google is fully prepared to take a risk activity of improvising technology that can help to curb the vice and restore customer confidence. It is hiring higher trained and qualified professional to help in crime detection, control, and elimination through beefed computer security systems. For all these to happen, the firm should take the risk of its finances since competitors are improvising new and modern technologies. Girard, (2008).

Risk assessment is vital as it places the level of risk the company is exposed. High levels of risk are dangerous to the firm. The project managers of Google have taken an initiative to assess the risks that the enterprise is exposed to. The assessment involves making the contingency plans to deal with the impact and mitigate the risks, proper actions to be taken to reduce the risk or its related impact, analyze the probability of the risks, plan to curb then appropriately and monitor the measures to ensure risks are managed and mitigated properly. Girard, (2008).

Question 2

When Google Company was established, the objectives were to change the life, simply life, bring success and connect people wherever they are found in the world. Attitude towards failure may originate from the personal or organizational point of view. Hill & Jones, (2009).

Google is a technology based company; hence an element of failure at the organization level triggers management intervention to provide the assistance necessary to advance and make the failure a success. It provides a learning opportunity for the firm to improve on. On the company perspective, failure may be on the part of the non achievement of the intended results or a problem in fully developing a new product, service or process. In growth process, a mistake is taken as a standard scenario in the organization. They make it a hard to gain the required success.

Teamwork and mutual involvement of all stakeholders help to allow an opportunity for the new ideas to staff, managers, top management executives, and external environment. In this, it will be able to combine all the efforts to overcome future failures and make them a new idea for improved performance. Therefore, at the organization level, failure is not seen as a negative factor, rather, a learning opportunity for productive future performance. Hill & Jones, (2009).

Question 3

At an individual level, the failure is regarded and taken differently. Google Company has employed thousand of experts with different talents to help in bringing in new ideas and innovativeness. At a personal level, it calls for the attention that the person needs advanced training on various matters. It alerts the management to provide individual learner ship.

Some people view own failure as the lack of competence. At Google Company, it is regarded as the opportunity to determine one`s level and assist him or her to improve on new skills and create an environment for creativity and innovativeness. Organization views personal failure as a requirement for it to help providing the necessary skills, capital investment, training, and motivation for newly developed ideas. It also needs to nurture these new ideas as patents. Hill & Jones, (2009).

Failure may be regarded as bad, at times inevitable and at times even good. It is a chance to improve the future performance of the company. It provides new opportunities for improvement to gain a substantial competitive advantage in the competitive world of innovativeness.

Question 4

At the individual level, mistakes are viewed as the failure and discouraging to new ideas. It makes employees feel incompetent, failures and lack a sense of independence. They cannot feel free to rethink the otherwise to innovation. It makes them feel naïve and inferior in regards to contributions to changes and suggestions that might be done in the process.

Although Google has taken this issue as a learning opportunity and encouraged, its workers see mistakes and failures as a chance to succeed in the future. It is because innovations are a challenging part of the organization and there are stiff competitions. Changes involve an element of creativity and learning new and fundamental ideas.

The company has also called for teamwork to reduce the mistakes. Employees can equally share knowledge, skills, and ideas and help one another to integrate their efforts and develop new ideas. Mistakes at Google are viewed as a way to future success; hence we should learn and make a difference from the same. In conclusion, misstates are good in Google rather than bad as they are viewed at a personal level.

Question 5

In my opinion, mistakes should not always be seen as total failures to change and innovations. It should rather be viewed as a learning opportunity for improved future performance. Mistakes trigger managers and other employees to realize the sense of teamwork, and should involve all people with different ideas and approaches. Integrating all their efforts leads to improved performance and rectify the mistakes.

It should not be regarded as a blame game. People blame ones who have made errors in the innovation process, this should not be the case since, and naturally admitting a mistake is inevitable. Line managers should encourage mistakes to be viewed as a positive occurrence to learning. It is through making such errors that performance improvements are realized in the long run. A sophisticated understanding of failure and mistakes will help to avoid blame games and act as a ground to learn from them to improve in the future. Girard, (2008).

Question 6

At Google, front line managers have been given a task to ensure they have given room for new ideas in the firm. First, they should create an enabling and free environment. An open condition for interactions enables the level confidence to increase and members can share3 ideas that are either job related or company related. By creating a supporting environment, it encourages new ideas to develop.

They should provide training grounds. It is the functional work offline managers to train employees on a mattress that are either departmental related or that affect the entire firm. Training exposes the employees to more difficult issues and creates an element of open-mindedness. It instills new ideas and processes that will finally assist workers to apply them independently, hence, they may rethink and question what if analysis. Girard, (2008).

They create an open environment and employee involvement in decision making. By involving employees in decision making makes them entirely feel like part of the firm directly. Google Company allows new ideas through either one on one interaction, personal training, and learning. An idea can own generated, a group made or even organization`s created.

Assist employees with new ideas to develop them. The line managers should see innovations as productive ideas for the future and assist in nurturing them. They should thoroughly encourage the employees to improve more. Managers should provide both financial and nonfinancial remunerations to support innovations. They should again establish a place where new ideas should be allowed to be developed.

Question 7

Google realized that to maintain its growth, the company had to come out with new products with entirely new and differentiated features, although the problem lies in converting the idea into a meaningful project. To overcome the problem, it came up with a solution through a program commonly known as sparrow which enables Googlers to create web pages with their new ideas which in turn allowed everyone to test the ideas. Steiber, (2014).

After feasible and user-friendly ideas had been selected, they were brought up for analysis and explanations where the engineer whose design was chosen was given enough time to present the idea. In case he was successful in defending the idea, then it would be turned into a product with the project headed by the Googler who presented it. In 2002 Google launched Google Labs, which enabled the public to test and provide feedback to new product, services, and technology, hence helping the company to identify the bad ideas fast and discard them quickly

Being a technology based firm, Google has set up many strategies to improve its culture of innovation work. The changes are necessary for its survival in the competitive age since it also faces competition from Facebook, Yahoo among others. It starts by helping innovators to solve their problems. Managers are seen to be able to provide an enabling environment to fix problems hence creating a free cultural environment to develop, nurture and review innovations. Steiber, (2014).

Make the innovation cool. Google has extended to a situation of creating a calm environment for innovation. Its helps employees to try new funny things which finally lead to a new complex, innovative idea. The company can also implement the remunerations packages and compensation for the innovators. Financial and nonfinancial services should be a package to innovators to encourage them. Also, the company can provide personal career growth in the job. It is done by recognizing the new ideas and talents; hence it will create internal competition which leads to growth. It will encourage all new ideas, and their developments make the firm competitive. Steiber, (2014).

Question 8

Barriers at the workplace are difficult not to be understood by management to proceed and make reasonable and satisfactory innovations. The company being a technology sector is mainly concerned with new ideas and innovations that can help to increase its competitive advantage to competitors. The barriers are;

There is inadequate funding. Innovations are also expense since it needs too much finance to initiate the process. As a result, it implies making interim or supplementary budgets to cater for the same. It involves taking money from other already established programs. Nehls, (2011).

Secondly, there is time commitment and consuming. Time is a very precious resource. Management is always in calculations with how time is being spent at the very stage of workplace .employees are paid mostly on time taken to finish a particular task. Innovations, on the other hand, are time-consuming since it takes a lot to experiment, innovate, test and implement changes in the workplace.

Company managers think they know it all. The centralization of innovations and creativity is the primary barrier. No one is perfect, hence needs the contribution of others in developing new strategies and innovations. They should provide an opportunity to all with changes minds to exploit their full potential. It should be encouraged that those with progressive ideas be promoted as opposed to the ones with static ideas. It is referred to us power struggle.

Poor communications within the company divisions is also a barrier. Google is a large company with many divisions. With time, the units become like companies of their own hence communication among the department is very hard. In the process, the ideas cannot easily be shared across the board. Steiber, (2014).

Resistance to change. Most employees resist new changes because they are used to old methods of working. The resistance makes the firm to deviate from its norms. When employees resist new ways, they make the company backward, and innovations are highly affected due to changing in the business environment. At Google, this is overcome by always promoting new changes and prioritizing them once they occur. Hence old habits are hard to break. Nehls, (2011).

Fear of failure. The fear of failure is the beginning of failing. People should take risks since failure should be seen as a good thing not as bad always as it has been. It is one of the greatest mistakes to the ones who work in an innovative firm by the lack of accepting failure. In innovation, failure is the key to success. When it is hard to find what is not working, it is a time to make it work.

Finally, lack of vision and creativity is a barrier to innovations. Creativity, design, and production all call for a vision. Vision is the ability to see what is next to come. Lack of vision will make innovation environment static and weak for the development of mid-set. There is learning to drop old practices and adapt to new modern technologies. Nehls, (2011).

Question 9

Managers are themselves seen as agents of innovations. They are the people to develop, nurture and implement changes within the firm. They should create new ideas and creatively develop ways of performance improvements at Google Limited. There are other ways to improve changes in the company.

They create a conducive environment for innovation. It is the functional unit of managers to establish an enabling environment for changes. They create the required conditions to make innovations work well. They also promote innovations by supporting new ideas developed in the firm. Adler, (2010

Financial assistance. They provide the money needed to purchase new equipment for changes. They also remunerate innovators well to encourage them to do more innovative work. Finances also assist in ensuring that new ideas are given room for expansion and full integration within the company.

Training opportunities. Managers support innovations by providing enough time for training the staff on the importance of changes and train them as per the company needs for innovations. The training can be both internal and external. External training is where the employees are taken out for learning in the different environment that exposes them to innovations. They interact with people of different strategies and share their mind to make a difference.

Employee involvement. Managers should integrate all workers to ensure decision-making decentralized where all are given freedom of expression and information. In this case, new ideas are quickly developed since there is no element of fear as workers freely interact with one another and with their seniors. Managers should make mistakes and failure as a ground for learning. Adler, (2010

Question 10

Learning is a necessary process so that employees can achieve the necessary objectives of the enterprise and it increases the firm1s performance. Learning needs analysis should be a continuous process in the firm. Learning comes after training. The main opportunities are; building network and knowledge sharing. It is a chance whereby interrelationships are set, and employees are allowed to share the knowledge they possess. It increases the level of innovations within the firm.

Secondly, an opportunity for listening and communication. Employees should be given a chance to communicate freely with his colleagues, teammate, and management so that they can share regarding innovations and creativity. Listening is vital as managers should always try to listen and understand the new ideas and concepts of innovations.

Develop deep technical knowledge. It is the functional responsibility to provide an opportunity for technical expertise since it is useful in developing innovations. It helps to create a challenging, innovative environment for creativity. Opportunity to support formal education. Google Company has given it a priority so that it will create innovations.

Question 11

In my opinion, evaluation is done to ensure the innovation ability sticks to the objectives of the firm and that there are no deviations from the norms. The managers can identify mistake early before the entire process fails. It helps to detect discrepancies in advance. The evaluation also contributes to ensuring that the idea will enhance a competitive advantage to the firm. It is done for reasons of consistency to the mission, visions, and goals of the industry. Adler, (2010).

It also acts as a control tool. To evaluate the innovations continuously monitors the ideas since the company has invested in the new innovators for its future survival. The controls help to ensure the finances invested by the firm in innovations are properly managed to provide an ample grounds for productive performance. Nehls, (2011).

Question 12

The physical structural and location affects innovations directly. Mountain view is the headquarter of Google is located in an area where competition for creativity is high. It helps the firm to continually learn from the competitors and strategize on ways to help in gain from competitors to advance in performance. The location needs to be beefed security and compliant to government regulations. It should be changed to a new place where new ideas are also nurtured. It has many branches across s the country.

Question 13

Like other companies, Google is also supposed to comply with the Enterprise Act on their operating procedures. It has to abide by the legislations of the land in which it is established. In this case, the legislations are for California USA. Some laws impact the firm negatively. In this case, the tax margin imposed by the state is high. Due to high taxes, Google is using different strategies for tax avoidance, and it pays the least taxes out of the five big firms in the American technology Companies. Its transfer pricing is under investigations by the French.

Environmental control. In 2007 Google launched a project aimed at developing renewable energy that is cheaper than coal. The company has been involved in carbon neutrality in regards to its operations.

REFERENCES

Adler, M. (2010). Google's leading brands in a GE Matrix: International Marketing Strategy: Google's major brands in a portfolio analysis. München: GRIN Verlag GmbH.

Girard, B. (2008). The Google way: 12 management strategies to revolutionize your business. San Francisco, Calif: No Starch.

Hill, C. W. L., & Jones, G. R. (2009). Essentials of strategic management. Mason, OH: South-Western/Cengage Learning.

Nehls, E. F. (2011). Business analysis project on Google inc. Place of publication not identified: Grin Verlag Ohg.

Steiber, A. (2014). The Google model: Managing continuous innovation in a rapidly changing world.