Heinz Entrepreneurship and Innovation
1a) In your own words, identify the situation the business in your first case study wants to address and the desired outcome it wants to achieve.
3M is the company which has been in business for 100 years, in 1902, there are only five young entrepreneurs founded the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. At that time, actually the mineral deposit proved to be bootless, so they had to change the idea, they planned to buy in the useful mineral to production sandpaper, and their unique new idea and arrange the foundations for the company, in order to development the company to this present day. At the beginning, the company is unreliable, so 3M has maintained a flow of groundbreaking inventions to achieve their goals, today,and the company has more than 50,000 different products, the consumer markets are more than 200 countries worldwide.
1b) In your own words, identify the situation the business in your second case study wants to address and the desired outcome it wants to achieve.
Heinz looked the existing portfolio, including products such as Heinz tomato soup, baked beans, tomato ketchup etc , and sat back to exploit these brands which were yielding year on year profit growth. However, Heinz decided to look to the future, developing new skills with a strong external focus in 1997 for addressing step change innovation. In the summer of 1996, an innovation agency organizes new ideas: developing new product which really meets the needs of today‘s consumers and introducing a Heinz culture of innovation. And the innovation must be adopted as a way of life.
2. Innovation strategies-critical analysis
2a) in your own words, critically analyze the role of creativity and innovation strategies and techniques in your first business case study.
1. innovation ideas: From the 3M Company, we can know that innovative organizations are very important, what is the consumer needs, and then develop suitable products, design it , post-it , and deliver it . Changing the new ideas into commercial reality and building a strong sustainable business is one of the company’sinnovations. 3M focuses on finding the practical way to help customers succeed.
2. strategy team: during the 20th century the company went on to build a strong capability in developing technologies, working closely with customers to anticipate and understand their needs, the company‘s strong culture of innovation enabled it to achieve many breakthroughs. The company‘s culture is the typical pattern of relationships and behaviors with an organization, people have freedom to explore new ideas with an environment that tolerated mistakes. Understands and manages the risk involved, a complete list of brainstormed ideas can help analyzed to agree what is feasible, like broaden their thinking and encourage good ideas, asking groups of people to generate ideas or questions.
3. Research and development: discovering new knowledge about products, processes and services, and then applying that knowledge to create new and improved products, processes, and services that fill market needs.
4. Innovative design: theCompany’sidea depends on manager‘s style. They delivered what they were good at producing, rather than what customers wanted, and provide customer focused solutions, also provide products make as well. They do many research and find out what is customer‘ need and how to meet their needs. In order to avoid the competitor copy, urgency and speed are essential; 3M has many kinds of programmers to ensure that it identifies new products with significant potential and allocates resources to commercialize them faster
2b) in your own words, critically analyze the outcomes achieved by those strategies and actions in your first case study.
1. Commercializing ideas involves many stages including priorities ideas, make a prototype, manufacture the product, market the product and generate sales, all these are make the company greatest potential for growth and profitability.
2. Intellectual property rights, this ensures that 3M can put resources into commercializing the idea without fear of another company copying it.
3. Accelerating innovation, it is focused on finding new customer-driven applications for existing 3M technologies, to find new ideas to grow sales, work as a small flexible, highly motivated team. The team is encourage idea-generation, commercialize product within 3 to 6 months, and priorities ideas against standard criteria.
4. 3M recognizes that commercial application it more important than technology itself. And the company created a new technology to reduce cost.
2c) in your own words, critically analyze the role of creativity and innovation strategies and techniques in your second business case study.
1. Innovation team: a team inside a business formulated for the purpose of creating innovation for the firm. People makes great innovation, who want to make things happen, who come up with and embrace new ideas, putting new ideas into practice and it is not just talk. Encourage people more practice, because failure is an inevitable part of change and that much can be learnt from failure.
2. Research and development: find out the consumer demand and methods of reducing production and distribution costs. It is a good way to evaluate the risk. Creating policy and new ideas will always be based on listening rather than careful planning, so meeting play a vital role in this point.
3. Strategy team: creating an innovation culture, like innovative culture, working culture, find out about the personnel‘s perceptions of the possibility. Changing the innovation, remove some of the barriers to innovation and to turn the organization and its culture around, give more time and encouragement to come up with the new idea. New consumer research techniques are being employed, making communication with consumers easier and quicker, improving the working environment, to make it more conductive to creativity.
4. Human Resources Department: individuals and teams are encouraged to contribute ideas to the folder, which provides a central collection point for ideas with the organization. Employees’ suggestions are very important, because brainstorming sessions and work with consumers and other external sources, many of the ideas being researched have been submitted by employees so it is vital that the ideas and products do meet true consumer needs and expectations. Heinz is continuing to extend creativity skills training across all functions of the company, and the working environment is being made more environment is being made more conductive to creativity by the introduction of creativity areas.
2d) in your own words, critically analyze the outcomes achieved by those strategies and actions in your second case study.
1. Introducing change, change the way to make employees come up with new ideas, get more information from the employees and customers, in order to make every action will be effectively.
2. Training the all functions skills and make the working environment more conductive to creativity.
3. create 2–5 products, over a nine month period, finding out which one are really needs for the customer and marketable. Practices make the result.
3. Critical analysis–comparison
Compare and contrast the innovation techniques of the two businesses.
1a) 3M: discover what customer want and then provide customer focused solutions, decide what you are good at producing and then provide products you make well. Encourage good idea and complete list of brainstormed ideas. Innovation is the heart of how 3M operates; the company has an entrepreneurial culture that encourages people‘s ingenuity managed by a structured development process. The company now is focused on maintaining momentum in increasingly tough markets to match its success of the last century.
2b) Heinz: the Heinz innovation case study provides an interesting example of the way in which an established organization can improve to cope successfully with the dynamic organizational environment. Organization must take risks-constantly re-inventing themselves to be more dynamic and responsive to change. They must be prepared to listen to customers and employees who are most in touch with processes within the organization. Clearly, some new steps taken by the organization will fail but others will lead to the big wins, which secure the long term prosperity of the organization. Success depends on taking imaginative risks and carefully balancing measure with madness.