Innovation and Leadership Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Innovation and Leadership - Assignment Example This paper illustrates that as contemporary experts in leadership and academic researchers highlight congruent aspects of the new era and draw attention on potential disruptive points and discontinuities, leadership emphasizes that only innovative, anticipatory, courageous and flexible individuals and organizations are capable to cope with the present uncertain and unpredictable business arena. Development studies confirm that creative companies, able to use innovation in order to improve value creation process or to differentiate products and services surpass their competitors in terms of market share, profitability, growth or capitalization. Innovation and technology management is still a complicated and risky problem: most new technologies fail to be translated into products and services, and those who become products and services not always gain the status of commercial success. In short, innovation can stimulate and strengthen competition, but in order to enhance a strong leader ship, it needs skills and knowledge different from those used for everyday business management. One of the first issues that arise when analyzing innovation consists in the multitude of interpretations that are attributed to the term; many times people even confuse innovation with invention. In a more limited sense considered by many researchers and practitioners, innovation is the process of transforming favorable situations into new ideas and putting these ideas in practices or products widely spread. Innovation does not necessarily mean selling a single significant breakthrough in a certain moment of technical and technological development (radical innovation) but also includes the use of changes (improvements) of less important technological know-how (an improvement or incremental innovation).