What are Essential conditions for successful Innovation?

What are Essential conditions for successful Innovation?

Ans:   Peter Drucker has described three essential conditions of innovation, for being successful. They are as follows:

(1)     Innovation is Work:

Innovation requires knowledge. It often requires great exceptional ability and talent. Innovations rarely work in more than one area. For example. Edison worked only in the electrical field. Graham Bell worked only in telecommunication area. Usually an innovator in a financial area (bank) is unlikely to start innovations in health care or cooking range. As in any other work, talent is required in innovation also ingenuity (intensive talent)and predisposition (inclination or willingness) are needed. Innovation becomes hard, focused and purposeful work making very great demands on diligence, on persistence and on commitment. If these are lacking, no amount of talent, ingenuity or knowledge will be fruitful.

(2)     To Succeed, Innovators must build on their strengths:

Although successful innovators look at opportunities over a wide area yet they identify only the opportunity that appears to be the most suitable to and achievable by them and their proposed enterprise. They match their capacities and resources with the projected demands or requirements of the identified opportunity. It must be a workable opportunity in the light of the strengths of the entrepreneur because innovative opportunities involve risks. The entrepreneur should also be satisfied with the temperamental ‘fit’ between him and the nature of the opportunity: For example, if the entrepreneur is a man of science, then he will not be a lit’ person to manufacture lipsticks or shoes. Rather he will be a ‘fit’ entrepreneur to run a computer company or a pharmaceutical enterprise. Thus, innovators need to be temperamentally attuned to the innovative opportunity. Such kind of a ‘fit’ promotes persistence, hard work, energy, confidence and psychological satisfaction in the entrepreneur, which a successful innovation always requires. Successful innovators are conservative — they are not ‘risk – focussed’; they are `opportunity – focussed’ and they have to be so — this is the real temperamental ‘fit between him and the opportunity.

(3)     Innovation is an effect in economy and society:

Innovation should bring a change in the behaviour of customers, of teachers, of farmers, of eye surgeons — of people in general. Innovation should bring a change in process — that is, in how people work and produce something. Hence, innovation always’ has to be close to the market, focused on the market — that is, it has to be market driven and increasing social satisfaction and progress of society.