Technological Innovations In Management

Innovations in Management

Introduction.

In the present world where innovations happen in every walk of life, the main focus has been on technological innovations. An equally important but often times neglected field of innovation is management innovations which is the corner stone of the development of any firm. A change in management practices can go a long way in furthering the developmental goals of the organization. Many of the practices, processes and structures that we see in modern business organizations were developed during the last 150 years by the creative efforts of management innovators. Those innovators have included well-known names like Alfred P. Sloan and Frederick Taylor,

Is the innovation something new to the state of the art or something new to the firm that’s implementing it? Does the management innovation include conceptualizing a new practice, implementing a new practice or both?The most common source of dissatisfaction leading to innovation is a strategic threat that has started to take shape through changes in the business environment or the emergence of new competitors. Management innovation occurs in a way similar to the well-understood process for technological innovation. We can observe individuals pulling together ideas and resources in novel ways, championing those ideas inside their organization, building coalitions of senior executives to support their ideas and using political skills to overcome internal resistance to the innovation. Management innovation typically takes places in the fringes of the organization rather than in the core. Manager and external agents work together to bridge the gap between concept and

Even the foundation stones of the modern business organization were at some point created by inventive and farsighted individuals: Luca Pacioli the Italian mathematician who popularized double-entry bookkeeping in 1494, and the limited liability company was created in 1856.The ability to manage the consistency of manufacturing processes has evolved: from Ford Motor’s introduction of the moving assembly line in 1913 and Western Electric’s invention of statistical quality control in 1924, through the quality revolution begun by Toyota Motor and other Japanese companies in 1945 and on to such recent innovations as the ISO quality standards and Motorola’s Six Sigma methodology, which were both introduced in 1987. Similarly, the ability to keep control of a company’s finances has changed substantially over the centuries, through such innovations as discounted cash-flow analysis, capital budgeting and, more recently, activity-based