Marketing DreamFarm Innovation Analysis report

Innovation is increasingly being considered as a core competency that organisations must develop. Companies that consistently innovate don't rely on chance; they address innovation in a systematic way.

Your task is as follows:

• Drawing on a wide range of literature on innovation (not just 1 or 2 sources), develop a framework that you could use to assess an organisation in terms of innovation. Describe your framework and justify the critical elements (with reference to the literature).
• The next step is to apply this framework to a particular organisation of your own choice. Where are the gaps? What is being done well, what areas need to be improved? Note: This organisation may be your own workplace or an organisation you would like to work for.

Finally, develop a plan to address areas of weakness. You may choose to focus on a few key areas and discuss them in detail.
Note: If you chosen organisation has a focus on services make sure that you choose literature that is appropriate for service innovation.

Innovation is an idea of creating a new product with value added features unavailable in the existing market. The project is conducted to study the importance of innovation and creativity for a high product design company known as DreamFarm. It will start with the literature review available in the area of innovation to give a brief idea to the reader about the prior research conducted in this area. It further helps and creates an understanding of the meaning of innovation for companies across the nations along with the organisational structure and product innovation they present to the world. It further highlights the purpose of innovation in the industry with a brief background, its further scope and future forecasts. The project will also help in brief about the methodology, assumption and limitation of this industry. The second part of the project will mainly discuss the framework which includes the understanding of literature and its relevance to the organisation. The third part of the project will critically analyse the company with respect to the gaps identified, the strength of the organisation and weaknesses the company already has. The later part will place certain recommendations which can be extremely useful for DreamFarm to have a wider space in the industry and for its future growth. The last part of the project will help you summarise the crux of the entire analysis.

1.     Introduction

Product and process innovations are the primary actions of innovations in any organisation. Although, very little is known about how to initiate as well as maintain the innovative momentum in an organisation so as to produce new products and enhance competitiveness. There are a number of contributions on this topic. During the ten-year period (1991-2001) an extensive literature review was conducted which covered over 400 scientific journals. More than 2500 journal articles were found to be relevant.  Literature mapping techniques were used to find out about the contributions they made to product innovation. This assignment tries to summarise the contributions which the individual articles have made.

1.1  Purpose

The main aim of this report is to develop a model or framework for innovation and apply it to DreamFarm to find out where it lacks in innovation and then finally it can work upon those gaps and stay competitive rather gain a competitive edge within the organisation.

1.2  Background

Innovation is a process by which an idea or an invention is translated into goods and services which create value and for which customers make the payment. In other words, innovation is making use of the new ideas. Innovation takes place only when the first commercial transaction occurs which involves a new product, process, system or device (Freeman, 1982).

Innovation can have different meanings in different contexts. The primary characteristic on innovation is changing. Innovation comprises all the technical, scientific, commercial as well as financial steps that are compulsory for the successful development and marketing of new and improved products that are manufactured, the commercial utilisation of new as well as improved processes or equipment or for introducing a new approach to social service (OECD, 1981). Based on this we can divide innovation into product and process innovation. Organisational innovation is another important division of innovation.

Thus, we can also define innovation as making new or enlarging products and services range and the related markets, establishing new techniques of production, supply as well as distribution and introducing changes in the work organisation, working conditions, skills of the workforce and the management (EC, 1995). Innovations can be of two types – radical breakthrough type and incremental progressive type.