Abstract
Innovation trends in human management are key factors that have a major influence in a company's competitiveness and its business sustainability. Therefore, an innovation process grants substantial and/or incremental improvements in all business processes, thus achieving organizational value that in turn promotes a definition of the organizational strategy and its actions. This definition leads an organization towards developing specific competencies and strengths that are paramount in obtaining concrete results, whilst competing within an ever-changing and turbulent economic environment. Thence, current and future trials and tribulations in sustainable innovation must be directed to all types of business models: commercial, managerial, financial, environmental, and social. It is very important to emphasize that the above must include staying ahead of trends in human resource management, aimed at simplifying processes, management guidance in information flow within the workplace, and building an organizational culture founded in innovation.
TopInnovation: A Foundation For Competitiveness
Utilizing innovation as the key building block for an organization’s competitiveness, transforms it as an improvement generator, either extensive or gradational, for all business operations, or at the very least, for some of them. Likewise, the fact that we are living in the Information Age has substantially increased not only the need, but the opportunities for companies to undertake successful innovation processes. That’s why more and more companies are willing to include creativity techniques when it comes to process, product and service creation, techniques that take full advantage of possible synergies, skills and proficiencies amongst creative teams.
Being innovation oriented allows organizational competencies to blossom therefore enabling a company to properly assess the external environment, thus timely reacting to its dynamism. According to Siguaw, Simpson and Enz (2006), different academic works have defined ‘innovation’ as a combination of notions, conceptualizations and meanings, all of which are properly aligned to the development of multidimensional and structural knowledge. These definitions have permitted a detailed understanding of the impact that innovation has in an organization’s strategic direction, allowing management to define strategies and organizational actions leading into specific innovation capabilities’ development within the areas of resource assignment, technology, human workforce, operations and markets (Figure 1).
These buildouts in turn generate the necessary skills an organization requires to properly embrace the innovation process, consequently leading to specific results that increase competitive performance.
Figure 1. Source. Authors Key Terms in this Chapter
Scenarios: Possibilities or perspectives of a fact or situation (RAE, 2019b).
SMEs: Small and medium enterprises.
GDP/Gross Domestic Product: A monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period, often annually.