Ladder of Opportunities
Lesson 2.2 Ladder of Opportunities
Organizations can develop innovation capability by encouraging creativity, idea generation and product and process innovations, creating the potential for employees to become agents of change (Saunila & Ukko, 2012). These tactics can become various forms of employee workplace innovation. However, the efforts to develop innovation capability can be limited based on the availability of resources and the associated complexity and uncertainty of the project. This, in turn, is an indication of the impact and scope of change (Tidd and Bessant, 2020) as depicted in Figure 4.1. It is, therefore, necessary to focus on employee workplace innovation within the boundaries of the required resources and an organization’s capacity to make resources available. More specifically, organizational resources may include human, tools and technology, and capital, as well the associated level of risk. The greater number and value of the resources required, and the higher or more threatening the risks involved, the larger the potential scope and impact on the organization. Different organizations and leaders will have different thresholds for using resources and taking risks.
It should also be noted that not all employees will have opportunities to engage in workplace innovation since the activities required must be supported by management (Khan and Mohiya, 2020). In its simplest form “support” could be the direct manager’s acceptance or encouragement of Job Crafting. As innovation projects become more complicated, they may require broader organizational support. In that case, bureaucracy can be an impediment to creativity and innovation, which is often the reason why large organizations lag behind startups and smaller organizations which can, by design, be nimbler and more adaptive.
In the previous module (Workplace Innovation), we looked at job crafting as the simplest form of employee workplace innovation. As we move up the ladder of opportunities, we will consider innovation adaptation. The skills and knowledge you develop in each step of this Ladder will provide a base for the next tier (Figure 2.2). Adoption of these practices at the organizational levels lend themselves to the development of organizational capability for employee workplace innovation.