7. Innovation

Traditionally, a company's new ideas and products come from its research and development (R&D) department. The initial idea for a car will be turned into a series of prototypes and tested. In software development, the final 'prototype' is the beta version, which is beta-tested. Pharmaceuticals go through a series of trials.

Different industries have different lead-times, the time between conception and product launch; a new drug might take 10 or 15 years to develop. In consumer goods, market research will be a key part of the development process, with focus groups: small groups representing cross-sections of consumers talking about their reactions to proposed designs, and wider consumer surveys. Services also offer enormous potential for innovation; think of telephone banking, and now e-commerce: selling over the Internet.

The launch of a new product might involve a national, international or global rollout. A well-oiled public relations machine will have prepared the way for the new product by getting the required media coverage, where the terms leading edge and state of the art will perhaps appear. Any teething problems will hopefully be ironed out during development rather than after the launch. The ultimate nightmare is when a company has to recall products because of design defects. The coverage this might get is the least welcome imaginable.

How do you develop innovation and creativity in large, bureaucratic companies? Company leaders talk about corporate venturing and intrapreneurship, where employees are encouraged to develop entrepreneurial activities within the organisation. Companies may set up skunk works, outside the usual structures, to work on innovations. Development of the PC at IBM is the most famous example of this.

Innovations are perhaps more easily developed by entrepreneurs in start-up companies, but here the problem is finance: how to get the venture capital to develop the product, manufacture it on an industrial scale and market it

Read on

Tom Peters: The Circle of Innovation, Coronet, 1999. The bestselling co-author of In Search of Excellence .

Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt: Managing Innovation, Wiley, 1997

James M. Utterback: Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, 1996

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8. Organisation

Businesses come in many guises, from the lonely-sounding self-employed person and sole trader, through the SME (the small or medium-sized enterprise) to the multinational with its hierarchy and tens of thousands of employees. But the questions about what motivates people in work are basically the same everywhere. The first question that self-employed people get asked is how they find the self-discipline to work alone and motivate themselves, with no one telling them what to do. Companies are also looking for this: job advertisements often talk about the need for recruits to be self-starters. Organisations want to attract the right people and find ways of motivating them to be ever more productive and creative.

The current buzzword is flexibility. This has a number of related meanings. One type of flexibility has existed for some time in the form of flexi time or flextime, where people can choose when they work within certain limits. Then there is the flexible working of the British Airways office in the main course unit, with some of its staff hot-desking, particularly those who are homeworking, teleworking or telecommuting and only need to come into the office occasionally.

A third type of flexibility is where employees are recruited on short contracts to work on specific projects, maybe part-time. Perhaps the organisation only has a core staff, and outsources or contracts out work from outside as and when required. Some management experts say that this is the future, with self-employment as the norm, and portfolio workers who have a number of different clients.

For the moment, most company employees still go to what is recognizably a job in a building that is recognizably an office, even if it is open plan with some flexibility. How long this will go on is an interesting question. The tradition of managers who like to see their subordinates working (or pretending to) has a lot of mileage in it yet, with some countries and industries evolving more quickly than others for all sorts of cultural and practical reasons.

Read on

DS Pugh and DJ Hickson: Writers on Organizations, 5th edition, Penguin, 1996. A good round-up of academic writing on what makes organisations tick.

Charles Handy: Understanding Organizations, 4th edition, Penguin, 1993

Again, Handy's more speculative writing on present and future developments can be recommended; in addition to the books in the Read on Section Employment, there is: The Age of Unreason, Hutchinson, 1995; and Waiting for the Mountain to Move, Hutchinson, 1995

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