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ANSWERS TO CHAPTER 10 QUESTIONS
ANSWER 10.1
3M used venture teams which comprised of employees of various
skills and disciplines (Gupta and Snghal, 1993). It engaged lead users
(von Hippel et. al. 1999) who as early adopters have needs far ahead of
others and are in general innovative customers, as well as other
external resources in pursuing an open innovation strategy with great
success. The company reported that it did generate about 30% of its
revenue from new product introductions over the past four years.
ANSWER 10.2
Creativity is the mental process through which a person combines
ad recombines his/her previous experience, possibly with some degree of
distortion, in such a way that he/she arrives at some new
configurations, new patterns, and arrangements, that better solve some
human needs. Innovation, on the other hand, is the creative process in
ANSWER 10.3
There are seven steps which I modified from Rossman (1964):
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(a) Recognize a new need or difficulty to serve as a spark for
initiating the whole inventive process.
(b) Analyze the needs – identify the true attributes or the
needs and define the real root causes of the difficulty/problem
at hand.
ANSWER 10.4
Helle (1997) presented a set of logical steps for the generic
problem-solving process, which I modified as follows:
a. Define the problem or issue effectively and avoid jumping to the
cause.
b. Verify that the solutions to the problem are regarded to be
useful and valuable to the organization.
c. Divide the problem into elements and consider reducing the scope.
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k. Choose the most comprehensive solution that is easiest to
implement.
l. Conduct cost/benefit analysis to verify the economic viability of
the proposed solution.
ANSWER 10.5
Harvard Business Essentials (2003) suggested the following six
sources for new ideas:
A. Customers – Customers offer best ideas regarding the
weakness of current services and problems which remain
unresolved. These types of inputs are of immediate value
to service enterprises.
D. Empathetic Design – Ideas may be generated by closely
observing how the current services are being utilized by
customers (Leonard and Rayport, 1997).
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Von Hippel, E., S. Thomke and M. Sonnack, (1999) “Creating
Breakthroughs at 3M,’ Harvard Business Review, (September-October).
Leonard, D. and J. F. Rayport (1997), “Spark Innovation Through
Empathetic Design,” Harvard Business Review (November-December).
Rigby, D. and C. Zook (2002), “Open Market Innovation,” Harvard
Business Review (October).
ANSWER 10.6
In the 21st century, service enterprises pursue open innovation,
instead of relying primarily on in-house groups to invent and innovate.
There is also more emphasis on group-based innovative activities,
rather than on individual efforts. Therefore, creative service systems
engineers and managers need to be managed as follows:
A. Promote active interactions with other creative people, as
invention comes more naturally via interactions with experts in
different domains and with different perspectives.
E. Allow some freedom to pursue some initial ideas, before they are
formally supported by the management.
F. Train creative people to thinking many different creative ways –
a formal training should be useful, rather than left it all to
the individuals.
ANSWER 10.7
A creative service systems engineer or manager is likely to exhibit
the following characteristics:
A. Have a curious, energetic and persistent mind.
B. Think in more abstract and theoretical terms.
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I. Treat all knowledge as unified and always ready to go into
different knowledge areas.
J. Be versed in the basic tools and operations of the scientific
and engineering fields relevant to services.
These characteristics are the composite of three lists:
(1) Characteristics of creative engineers (Dhillon 2002)
(2) characteristics of creative scientists (Root-Bernstein,1989), and
(3) Characteristics of entrepreneurs (Sinetar 1987).
ANSWER 10.8
Listed below are a few selected creativity methods in engineering.
While each of them is useful in different situations, they can be used
in combination.
A. Group brainstorming method – The group involves typically 8 to 10
people to focus on defining ideas to solve a specific problem. As a
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ANSWER 10.9
The following set of metrics should be useful for the purpose at
hand (Thamhain, 2003).
A. Number of new services concepts identified
Management, Vol. 33, #3, pp. 297-311
Answer 10.10
According to Dhillon (2006), there are several reasons for some
people to resist changes in organizations:
A. Poor understanding of the purpose of change
B. Existence of satisfaction with the status quo.
C. The change causes anxiety over job security
Scientific, pp. 122.
ANSWER 10.11
Literature is full of lessons gained by others in managing
innovation, which needs constant attention. Examples include (Tidd
and Besant, 2009):
1. Secure senior management’s support and endorsement to promote
innovation across the whole business.
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ANSWER 10.12
There are quite a number of factors that are critical to the
successful management of innovation. These include (Tidd and Bessant,
2009): Company culture which offers encouragement, empowerment and
rewards to diverse people who pursue innovative ideas.
1. Commitment of the company’s senior management to innovative
ANSWER 10.13
According to Tidd and Bessant (2009), the top challenges in
managing innovations are:
1. Creating a company culture that is conducive to innovative
pursuits and that encourages diverse people to want to be
Source: Tidd, Joe and John Bessant. 2009. Managing Innovation:
Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change, 4th
Edition, pp. 45 -47, John Wiley & Sons.
ANSWER 10.14
A. Marketing and innovation are two competencies of significance to
any enterprise.
Innovation is much needed by any enterprise to assure
competitiveness in the marketplace by ways of new or improved
value packages offered to customers. As each product/ service has
Answer 10.15
For cross-functional teams to become effective in producing
innovative products/ services, several things need to happen:
1. Teams must be composed of members who are creative in thinking
and fast in learning new things, have collaborative attitudes and
trust toward other members, possess divergent work experience and
2. Teams must be led by leaders who are respected by all
participants (because of their knowledge, ethics, fairness, and
other leadership qualities), experienced in solving problems and
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by top management (by ways of authorities given, resources
assigned, and priorities established). The team leaders have
positive mindset to constantly encourage innovative thinking.
3. Company should have progressive policies in place regarding